


still the stars find their way

by cosmogyrals



Category: Captain America (Movies), Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Exposition, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, The Year that Wasn't, Timeline Shenanigans, and it's kinda dark, basically everything sucks, canon fusion, or maybe dystopian roadtrip, post-apocalyptic roadtrip, so much exposition, steve loves badass ladies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 23:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 42,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14883408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyrals/pseuds/cosmogyrals
Summary: Martha Jones is trying to save the world. So is Steve Rogers, just in a different way. Freshly thawed out, he's never known a modern world outside of the Master's reign, and it looks all too familiar to him. Though his job is ostensibly to guide Martha through a vastly changed America, Martha does more to help him find his way back to himself than he realizes.





	1. prologue/chapter one

**Author's Note:**

> originally written for nanowrimo 2016. this has been one very long journey, since I first envisioned the idea of steve acting as martha's bodyguard a good six months before that. I'm sure there are all kinds of wibbly-wobbly timeline and plot things, but please be patient with me; I had to work most of this out from the ground up. (there's a whole lot of background that never made it in here, needless to say.) all canon inaccuracies, historical errors, or- well, anything else is my fault. thanks to everyone who listened to my complaining, offered advice, or, in one case, inspired an entire chapter to help stretch out my word count. this wouldn't have happened without you. c:

Prologue

_June 2008, somewhere in the Arctic Circle_

"Do you know how many expeditions my dad went on? I don't know why you expect this one to turn out any different."

The only good thing about summer in the Arctic Circle, Fury reflected, was that the weather was relatively mild: the days got above freezing and killing blizzards didn't usually happen. his was also the season in which polar bears were raising their young, and you really didn't want to piss off a polar bear. Thankfully, there weren't many on the glacier where they'd made camp.

Although if he had to spend too much more time cooped up in a small tent with Tony Stark, there was a decent chance he'd throw him to a raging mama bear looking to feed her cubs.

"All your dad had was lifelong survivor's guilt and more money than God, neither of which helped him find what he was looking for. I had to use some serious connections, call in a favour or two." 

"You couldn't have done this a couple decades ago?" _Like when my dad was still alive_ , Tony's tone of voice implied. This tent wasn't big enough for the two of them _and_ Tony Stark's daddy issues. But since he'd brought Tony along for the explicit purpose of serving as scientific know-how - and to keep him from getting his damn fool ass killed while Fury was out of the country - feeding him to polar bears probably wasn't the best idea.

"The situation wasn't dire enough then." And it had to be pretty goddamn dire for him to use the sources he had. A genocidal alien ruling the world counted as plenty dire, as far as he was concerned. His source hadn't agreed, but he hadn't expected him to; all Fury needed was for him to give him the information. Which, luckily, he had.

"So you think this is enough to save the world from a megalomaniac." 

"It was last time." Fury shrugged. He was way the hell out of his depth, and he didn't even know if this would work. But all of his operatives were scattered around the world, and none of them had contacted him in nearly two months. He wasn't even sure what he was going to do with _this_ option, but it was the only weapon left in his arsenal. The only one that even stood a chance of saving the world, as far as he was considered.

 

"Okay." Tony rose to his feet and zipped up his parka, snugging the hood tight around his face. "Let's go hunt for a relic, then."

_October 2008, Siberia_

The trouble with humans, he thought, was that they had no sense of finesse, no true feeling for artistry in their work. The files on this particular project lay strewn across a rusted metal desk before him, the HYDRA operative who had led him to the facility standing to one side, hands clasped behind his back.

They had all been so eager to serve him. There were always parasites who would crawl out of the woodwork, so happy for any opportunity to suborn their fellow man. He'd been vaguely aware of HYDRA at some point, probably whilst poking around Germany during the war (utterly _boring_ ), maybe in the Soviet Union afterwards. 

They thought they were plotting to overthrow him at some point. He allowed their secret plans to continue because it amused him, because the pockets of resistance elsewhere were, frankly, so pathetic that he needed something more to keep him occupied. He would eventually crush them with ease - but first, he was more than happy to take advantage of their resources.

"You might as well have used a sledgehammer," he sniffed as he peered at the machine that was allegedly used to wipe the operative's mind between missions. Oh, it would accomplish that, certainly, but the damage it caused would be irreparable. Not that _he_ cared about things like that, but it would have been so much lovelier to brainwash him in a more delicate fashion, to exploit the true irony of the situation. To make him serve willingly, turn him against everything he had known and loved. To see the horror in his eyes when at last, he realised the monster he had become.

 

But what was done was done; the man in the chamber in front of him had been mind-wiped so many times that it was a miracle he hadn't been reduced to the level of a drooling infant by now. He tapped the thick glass with an index finger, much like he might have tapped on an aquarium full of fish, watching the frost on the glass melt under the leather of his gloves.

"Defrost him."

"The words-"

"There's no need for that. I'll deliver my instructions personally." As if he needed a set of words to trigger a hypnotic state. How absurd.

"Just the one?"

The others were, according to the records, entirely uncontrollable; they had been created with an imperfect version of the formula. That wouldn't do: he wanted his quarry alive. Not what this specimen typically did, but he had faith that his orders would be carried out to the letter.

"Only this one."

One highly trained assassin, one inexperienced girl. All he needed was to have Martha Jones in his custody. The Winter Soldier would deliver her.

 

Chapter One

_November 2008, San Francisco_

The problem with hiding away on a cargo tanker was that it didn't exactly give you the opportunity for baths, Martha reflected. It was daft, the things she missed after six months of wandering the world, but regular bathing was foremost amongst them. She had spent the better part of three weeks on ships, first from Brisbane to Honolulu, and from there to San Francisco. While she had become used to her own odour, she knew that she had to smell downright awful to normal people.

Not that any of them were normal anymore.

The safe house she'd been given directions to in San Francisco was in a run-down part of town, one that had been ramshackle even before the Master's reign. It was safer that way; looters (not that there were many anymore, not that anyone had the energy to try and loot anything after a day of labour) always aimed for the more prosperous parts of town, and so patrols, both human and Toclafane, did likewise. Martha didn't care what it looked like, just as long as it didn't rock to the rhythm of the waves.

Usually, she spent nights in one of the barracks, but she didn't know where they were here, didn't have any contacts yet, aside from the woman who manned the safe house. And besides, she wasn't in any condition to be around other people right now; maybe they wouldn't have cared, but _she_ did. She needed sleep in a real bed (or something close to it), whatever food she could scrounge up, and something resembling a bath, not necessarily in that order.

"You're supposed to have an escort," the woman informed Martha while she shoveled stale cereal into her mouth. By this point, it wasn't enough to put Martha off her food; she'd had worse, and she'd learnt that you had to eat when you had the opportunity.

"An escort?" It wasn't uncommon for someone to accompany her from city to city, but Martha hadn't even started her work here yet, and she wouldn't be ready to leave for at least a day or two. She frowned down at the cereal, picked something that was multicoloured and sugary out of the mix. "What's this supposed to be?"

"Pot of gold, I think." The woman leaned in, squinting at it. "Hell if I know. I've never seen a pot of gold that looked like that."

"No, I mean-"

"A marshmallow." She shrugged. "You don't have Lucky Charms in England?"

Marshmallows, in Martha's experience, were not supposed to crunch. But it didn't have bugs in it , so she kept eating it anyway, answering the question with a shake of her head. She'd spent several days living on beef jerky and carefully rationed bottles of water , and she was desperate for anything different, even if it was oversugared American cereal.

"Not that you can get them here anymore. Or Pop-Tarts. I'd kill for a Pop-Tart."

"We had those," Martha offered helpfully. "My mum never let us eat them." And she was pretty sure she wouldn't have let them eat Lucky Charms, either. She thought about her mum and the rest of her family, trapped on board the Valiant, and her throat constricted for a moment. "Is there somewhere I can wash up?" She hoped her voice didn't sound too tight.

"Bathroom's upstairs, next to your bedroom. Good luck with the taps."

The water from the taps came out cold and rust-coloured, but Martha still stripped out of her grimy clothes and washed off as best she could. All of the clothes in her pack were equally dirty at this point; she did what she could to clean them and wrapped herself in a towel, spreading them on a closet rod in the room that she assumed was hers. This was deserted for a safe house; usually there were ten or twenty people crammed into one, and she got a pile of blankets in a corner. Having one be so unoccupied was _weird_ , and rather unsettling. But it was a bed, a real bed, and Martha was too exhausted to turn down an unexpected comfort when it fell into her lap.

Still clad in only a towel, Martha fell into the bed, pulling musty-smelling covers over her, and fell asleep almost immediately.

 

_Washington, DC_

SHIELD was no longer headquartered at the Triskelion - a place Steve Rogers had never been to, although he'd seen the ruins on the shore of the Potomac - but in an underground bunker somewhere in...Virginia, he thought. It didn't matter; states didn't really exist anymore. Nations didn't exist anymore. He'd gone under the ice with the threat of one tyrant nearly banished, only to wake up and discover another threat had arisen. The world didn't need Steve Rogers, but it sure as hell needed heroes.

Most of them, as it turned out, were dead, gone out in a blaze of glory, or simply snuffed out in a heartbeat. It didn't matter; dead was dead. They had yet to find anyone or anything who could stand up to the Toclafane; Tony Stark had been killed when they'd found him trying to take one of the things apart.

_Don't be stupid._ That was one of the first things Nick Fury had impressed on him when they'd returned to America. Probably, although Fury never said it, what he thought had got Tony killed a few months later.

And Steve? Steve had been biding his time, because there was nothing he could do. He was a soldier, and there was no army. They were in a war that couldn't be won - a war that had already been lost in every possible way. Humanity, for the most part, hadn't even tried to fight back. There was an underground resistance, but what did it achieve? Nothing, as far as Steve could tell. He'd offered to go free people from the labour camps, to sabotage factories, and every goddamn time, Fury had told him to wait, that it wouldn't make a difference. The people would be recaptured, the factories would be rebuilt. The Master didn't care about any of it. The Toclafane outnumbered the people, had some way of sensing them no matter what they did. There were even humans who willingly served the Master - not that Steve, who remembered HYDRA all too well, was surprised by that.

You could disappear from the world for sixty years, but some things would never change.

Everything else had, as Fury had informed him when they'd travelled back from the Arctic Circle. But it didn't make a difference, not with the way things were now. None of the technology that had been invented in his time under the ice was in use anymore - not outside the Master's factories - and the fabric of society itself had changed. It was exactly like the front in Europe had been during the war, except this was _America_ \- not just America, but the entire goddamn world.

Someday, if they won, Steve would have to get used to the way things were in the twenty-first century. Someday, he hoped to help rebuild his shattered nation. But first?

First, he had to kill the Master.

He'd seen pictures of Mount Rushmore, the presidents' faces replaced with the smirking face of the man who had called himself Harold Saxon. All the monuments in Washington had been obliterated, graceful lines of white stone scorched into rubble. Everything that had once represented America was destroyed, and its people were ground under the heel of a dictator. It was everything he'd fought against in the war, what he'd thought he'd given his life for. But he was still alive, even though everyone he loved was dead, and he had one last duty.

"This is what Stark was working on when he was killed." Fury slid a piece of green plastic across the table to Steve. Gold circuits caught the flickering light of the fluorescent bulb hanging above them. It was about an inch square, with a hole drilled through one corner - for a chain, he assumed. "Supposedly, it keeps the Toclafane from noticing you. I had an agent stand outside for a couple hours and he didn't get caught, so I'm assuming it works." There was a wry twist to his mouth.

"That's reassuring." Steve unclasped the chain of the dog tags he still wore, slid it on next to them. The plastic was cool against the skin of his chest when he tucked the chain under his clothes again. "Do I need to do anything?"

"Hell if I know. He didn't leave any notes." 

Steve had gone with Fury to inspect the laboratory, and although he'd seen the worst horrors HYDRA and the Nazis had inflicted on Europe, he still didn't like to think of what the scene had looked like. He'd known Tony for a brief time, had respected the man, as he'd respected his father. The carnage had made his skin crawl. Most humans would have been incapable of such brutality - but the Toclafane weren't human. Nobody knew what they were, and Stark's execution had been a clear warning to anyone else trying to investigate their true nature.

"Why are you giving this to me now, sir?" Military habits were hard to abandon. As far as Steve was concerned, Fury was his CO now. He wasn't a friend - Steve didn't have any friends anymore, didn't exactly have the opportunity to make any. Fury gave the orders - intercept a shipment here, sneak someone out of the camps there - and Steve obeyed. He was a precision instrument, a tool, nothing more.

"You heard anything about a woman named Martha Jones?" 

"Doesn't ring a bell." It wasn't like he had much in the way of contact with anyone else.

"People say she's going to save the world. I don't put much stock in that kind of thing, but I need to know what information she's got, why everyone seems to be putting their hopes in her. There's a rumour that she might be collecting pieces of a weapon created to kill the Master. Whatever the deal is, I need you to find out. If it's a weapon, then you need to take it and use it yourself.

"She's landing in San Francisco in a week, according to my sources. I can get you on a cargo plane going as far as Denver tomorrow afternoon; that'll give you five days to get there. You tell her that you're accompanying her across the country as her bodyguard. Make sure she gets where she needs to go."

Another object on the table, this one a black notebook, small enough to fit in a jacket pocket. "This is an extensive list of safe houses and agents in the lower forty-eight states. They may or may not be compromised, but this is all the information I have as of this moment. If you're captured, destroy it before it falls into enemy hands."

"This isn't my first rodeo, sir." Steve raised an eyebrow. He hadn't realised Fury's network was so extensive. These days, it was hard to communicate in any timely fashion, in any way that couldn't be intercepted, but obviously, Fury had his ways. Though his plans weren't the same as the ones the resistance had, he would be glad to piggyback on their resources as long as he could. 

"And make sure that damn shield is painted black. Matte black. No star-spangled whatever anywhere, and that includes your outfit. Don't be an idiot, Rogers."

It was a bone of contention between them; Steve understood the need for stealth, but he also believed that the people living under the Master's oppression needed a symbol of hope, something they could believe in. Maybe Captain America was nothing but a legend these days, but he thought that he could be that symbol again. Fury thought it was nothing but a damn target on his back.

"Yessir." Steve snapped a salute.

"Your plane leaves at 0800 tomorrow. Be in position in the cargo bay at least two hours before that. You won't be noticed." Meaning that some of Fury's double agents were risking their lives to get him in place. They were limited these days; after Stark had been found out, the humans serving the Master had been questioned more closely, put under more scrutiny. There was a real chance that anyone found helping him could be killed. It was like operating behind enemy lines, except the territory was _supposed_ to be his home. Steve didn't like the feeling at all.

 

_San Francisco_

"Are you, uh, Phileas Fogg?" 

She was in a dead sleep - _too damn heavy_ , a voice in her head told her, _stupid, that's the sort of thing that'll get you killed_ \- and awoke in a start, instincts telling her to huddle as small as she could, hide under cover, _quick before they see you_ -

And then she realised she was in a bed. And that she was only wearing a towel under the blankets.

(Stupid mistake, she should have put her wet clothes on, she always had to be ready to run. What had she been thinking?)

Martha slowly poked a tousled head out from under the blankets as her mind caught up with events. Her heart raced from the shock of being woken up like that, of her body instinctively kicking into danger mode.

"You don't look much like a Phileas," the man added, and Martha couldn't tell whether or not he was being serious.

"I am." She wasn't, but that was the code the resistance used, and she was getting _so_ sick of the Jules Verne reference. "You must be Passepartout." The countersign that proved she was safe as well - bloody ridiculous, because _anyone_ could guess it if they knew anything about literature. It was the sort of thing you could have Googled, if Google still existed. (The servers were still there, presumably, but the Internet had winked out shortly after the Master had taken over. Along with mobiles, televisions, even regular telephones. There were no more methods of mass communication.)

"Did you think about _knocking_ first?" she added, perhaps a little sharply. Martha's first impression of the man leaning over her bed was of very broad, muscular shoulders, probably because they were closest to her. A shock of blond hair fell over his forehead, and his blue eyes were wide with apparently innocent concern. His gaze slid down, caught bare skin, and his fair pallor blushed a blotchy red as he tried to look anywhere else.

"Sorry, ma'am, I just- She told me to go on up, and I thought-" He stammered through a couple of half-sentences before rising to his full height and turning his back on her. "I'll just-"

"Let me get dressed?" Martha suggested, trying not to roll her eyes.

"Uh. Yeah." He cast one more glance over his shoulder before backing out of the room. Martha waited till the door clicked shut before she got out of bed, still clutching the towel tightly around her. Her clothes were, as expected, wrinkled, and still a little damp, but it was probably as good as she was going to get. At least they smelled clean, more or less. A few moments to put them on, another few yanking a brush through her hair before pulling it back into a ponytail, and she was ready to go. Her life had become more streamlined these days, everything that was unnecessary or unavailable cut out. No more makeup, no styling her hair. She missed the simple pleasure of making herself look nice, of picking an outfit for some reason other than stealth. She missed wearing jewelry, but one of the first things she'd learnt was that she couldn't wear anything that might catch in the sun and sparkle. Nothing that would make her stand out or give her position away.

She packed her other outfits quickly, rolling them up to fit them into the backpack that held the sum of her worldly possessions. Martha straightened the bed, hung the towel up, and opened the door again. "Have you got a name, or am I just meant to call you Passepartout?"

"Steve." He didn't offer a last name, and Martha didn't expect him to. The less you knew about someone, the less likely you were to betray them if you were captured. He offered a hand, and Martha took it, her hand enveloped in his large, warm grip. His handshake was strong and firm, but cautious, almost as if he was holding back. 

"I'm Martha." As he probably knew already, but it was only polite to introduce herself, even if they hadn't hit it off on the best foot.

"I knew you didn't look like a Phileas." He gave her an amused grin, and Martha found herself struck by his smile. Absolutely gorgeous, she thought, before she mentally kicked herself. She hadn't thought about anyone like that in months (not since meeting Jack Harkness, in fact), and this wasn't exactly the time to go mooning over men. Besides, if there was one thing she'd learnt, fancying blokes she'd only just met led to nothing but trouble.

"Yeah, well, who does these days?" Not that Martha was exactly a common name; it was something she'd resented her mum for throughout her childhood and well into her teenage years. She didn't have a problem with being named after her suffragette great-aunt, but it was so incredibly old-fashioned. At least Tish and Leo had got names that could be shortened to something relatively modern; Martha was entirely hopeless.

 

"Were you planning on eating breakfast, or-" Steve shrugged as he followed Martha downstairs. He was hungry, but thanks to his enhanced metabolism, he was almost always hungry. It was goddamn hard getting enough food these days, and he didn't know how he was going to survive a prolonged road trip. His pack was pretty much full of protein bars, MREs, and beef jerky , but he figured he'd probably have to start scavenging by the end of it, and that was trouble for a city boy like him. Even during the war, he'd been able to rely on rations. He wondered what Martha did while she was travelling; her clothes hung loose on her in a way that suggested she'd been short on food for awhile, too, and her petite frame was thinner than it should have been.

"More Lucky Charms?" She made a face of displeasure. "God, I guess so. I need to eat something before we head to the camps; I can't just arrive and expect them to feed me straight off."

Steve didn't have any idea what the hell a Lucky Charm was - beyond a rabbit's foot, and he didn't think she was talking about that. As it turned out, it was a bowl full of stale cereal, with colourful...things lurking in it. "We're going to the camps?" 

"Uh, yeah." Martha paused in the middle of eating, giving him a bewildered look over her bowl of cereal. "Didn't they tell you?"

"I didn't have much of a briefing," he admitted with a shrug. "They just sort of shoved me on an airplane." Or, rather, he'd snuck onto one, crawling across the tarmac on his belly in the pre-dawn light. He'd gone earlier than Fury had told him to, to blend into the shadows while it was still dark enough, and it had taken him a good hour to get into place.

"I thought you were from here." Her brow furrowed slightly. "They always give me native guides."

"I'm from Brooklyn, ma'am." Steve kept his head down and just kept shoveling the sugary cereal into his mouth, helping himself to another bowl once the first one was gone. "And I'm not really much of a guide, I'm more of a bodyguard."

"Okay, first off, don't call me ma'am. It makes me feel old. Second, I don't _need_ a bodyguard; I've got this." She fished a length of twine out of her pocket, a key dangling at the end of it. 

Steve wasn't sure what to say, how to react to her blunt manner. "A key?" What good was a key going to do?

"Never mind. Just- it keeps people from noticing me. And Toclafane. You have to be concentrating when I've got it on, else I just sort of fade into the background." She put the loop over her head, and Steve found his gaze sliding to one side, disconcertingly. He couldn't quite focus on her, no matter what he did. "Don't worry, you'll get the trick of it eventually. Point is, you haven't got one. As far as I'm concerned, that makes you a liability when I'm travelling cross-country."

"A liability?" That was the first time in almost seventy years anyone had called him a liability. "Ma'am- Martha, I don't think you understand. You're travelling across unfamiliar territory that's swarming with enemy troops, and-" His gaze flicked to her hip, just visible past the edge of the table. "You don't have a gun, do you?"

"I don't need a gun.You're a soldier, aren't you? I can tell by the way you talk. You see,, I'm not doing what a soldier would do. I'm doing what a doctor would do."

"You don't seem much like a doctor." Steve regretted the words almost as soon as they left his mouth, seeing the sudden change in Martha's expression. Her brows drew together and her lips pursed tightly, and she pushed the cereal away from her with a forced calmness that implied she would have rather thrown the bowl at his head.

"Yeah, well, you seem like an idiot to me," she huffed. "Like I said. A liability. I've been doing this for months now, and trust me, I'm better off on my own."

"I was told that you were in search of a weapon to kill the Master, that the parts were scattered around the world," he said carefully. "I'm supposed to help you find the one that's here, wherever it is, and make sure you get out of the country safely. I don't see how risking your life at the labour camps will help achieve that goal." And that was all he could allow himself to think about, the goal. His goal, the one she wasn't allowed to know about.

"And if you think like a soldier, then you never will." She tipped her chin up stubbornly. "But that's where I'm going, and if your task is to follow me, then that's where you're going, too." Martha carefully put the remainder of her dry cereal back into the box and rose from her seat, the rusty metal legs slithering against peeling linoleum.

Steve followed her without complaint; she took the key out of her pocket again when she reached the front door of the house, putting the makeshift necklace on. His eyes still refused to focus on her, but he found that he could follow her by keeping track of where she wasn't. If he couldn't look at something, then that was where Martha was. 

As for his own pendant, it seemed to be working; the city was deserted, apart from the odd Toclafane hovering on patrol, and none of the devices seemed to pay either of them any mind. Still, they both kept to the shadows, skulking through the alleys, which were filled with months of refuse and what Steve barely recognised as human remains in various stages of decomposition. Washington wasn't any different - society had broken down as soon as the Toclafane had started their slaughter, or so he'd been told. The dead were everywhere, and the living, for the most part, herded into the camps. Each city had several for different purposes, but they were all devoted to the mysterious labour the Master needed.

Martha occasionally paused to consult a hand-drawn map, passing information to him in tense whispers. She seemed unaffected by the bodies - but then, if she had been travelling since the beginning of the Master's reign, it would have simply become another fact of existence, as it had been for him in long months at the front during the war. He'd seen the aftermath of enough battles that it just seemed normal to him, and he hated himself for it sometimes. It was something he had never wanted to become, but it was a necessary part of being a soldier.

They slipped into the camp by a back gate that had been left cracked open for them; it was almost dusk, and the sounds of labour had ceased for the day. Everyone was crammed into the barracks, roughly constructed ramshackle buildings made of corrugated steel and concrete.

"Makes you wonder how they built them so fast," Steve commented to Martha. His companion had been largely silent so far - not that he'd expected her to talk. Talking was a good way to get yourself caught; voices carried over a distance, especially when everything else was silent. Maybe whatever she had kept people from seeing her, but he didn't think it kept them from hearing her, and he knew his didn't.

"They built them first, I think. In most of Europe and Asia, they're crammed into flats, but I saw these where the houses were spread out more. Made people put them up, told them they'd be outside till they were done. I don't think Saxon liked it, but someone had to convince him that housing was a necessity. Otherwise he probably would have made them sleep outside and forced them to just build the factories."

"It's only been six months. You can't make things happen that fast," Steve protested.

"You can when you focus on it exclusively, devote all your resources and manpower to make it happen. Look - they're pieced together from scrap metal. They took whatever they could find and used it to build. The proper metal was shipped here to build the factories, but they had to make shelter first. They couldn't wait for it - or maybe they knew they wouldn't get any." Her tone was almost resigned; there was anger in it, but it was banked to embers, rather than the flames he might have expected.

"This isn't sustainable, though." It looked worse than the tenements he'd grown up in. At least there, the buildings had been uniform in appearance, even if they'd been crumbling.

"It doesn't need to be sustainable."

"Why?"

She took a deep breath, looked like she was about to say something, then paused. "I'll explain more when we've got time. Right now, I have work to do." Martha eyed the barracks. "At least they're all in one place. This would be harder if they were spread out."

"What would be harder?" Goddamn, she was cryptic, and it drove Steve crazy. He hoped she wouldn't be like this the entire time; he just wanted to get whatever it was she needed. Surely Fury would see that she got back to England eventually, if that was what she wanted - or at least make sure she was kept safe once they found out her goal. There was no way she was planning on killing the Master herself, not when she'd been so angry when he had asked her if she had a gun.

The barracks was full of people of every age, from children to elderly, all crowded in. There were some beds, arrayed in bunks along the walls, but mostly what he saw was people clutching blankets to their chest - all they had, he assumed. They turned to look at him as he made his way through, but disregarded him once they saw Martha. Steve wasn't much used to being overlooked in a crowd; that didn't really happen when you were six foot three and muscular. But Martha - it was like a spotlight shone down on her, the way everyone's gaze followed her. She could have been the Queen of England from the way they treated her, presenting her with a dented cup of what he assumed was some sort of soup, making sure she had a place by the barrel. He was left standing awkwardly to one side, sticking out like a sore thumb at the edge of a crowd.

When she'd mentioned acting like a doctor, he had assumed she would be coming to the camps to render medical aid, and had regarded the idea as ridiculous. Doctors were one of the few professions allowed to move from camp to camp without restriction; there wasn't much care available, but it existed. Sometimes. Depending on where you were, and if there happened to be a doctor who was still alive, and you had a condition that was treatable. Anyone who wouldn't be able to recover and go back to work didn't get medical attention.

"You all think I'm here to save the world," Martha began, and the crowd leaned towards her as one, a field of flowers turning their heads to the sun. "You believe in me, think that I'm some sort of saviour. But I'm not important at all; I'm just here to spread the word. Once you hear it from me, you'll be able to do the same thing. And that's exactly what I want you to do. Because the Master, he can control us, he can imprison us and make us work for him, but he can't imprison our minds, or our hearts, or our spirits. 

"You think I'm going to save the world. But I'm not; the man who is, the man who's done it more times than you can possibly count, is the Doctor. He does it every day, and you don't even notice. He's done it all throughout time and space, on more planets than we even know about, saved so many more species than just us. Listen:"

_A forest of flowers rises around them, perfume mingling in the air, grains of golden pollen hanging hazily in the beams of sunlight. Martha wishes she could use her phone to take pictures to send to her mum and Tish; they'd never believe this. They'd never believe half of what she's done with the Doctor, the things she's seen, the places she's been._

_"Martha!" The Doctor waves a hand from one stem that's big enough to wrap her arms around. There's a smaller tendril curling around it, and he grins broadly at her as he grips it, begins climbing up._

_"You're mad," she laughs, but she follows in his wake, sap sticky on her palms as she climbs. They reach the top, clinging to velvety soft petals together. The world above is a riot of colour - but there's a smudge of sickly brownish-black in the distance, a hint of rot in the perfume. The smile on the Doctor's face suddenly disappears, and he descends the flower in a hurry._

_"Crizotes - parasites," he explains grimly. "Well, that's a gross oversimplification, really, but- did you know this planet is the only place where you can find the Aripoae? Giant butterflies, more or less; they tame them and use them as transportation in the cities. Here, in the flower fields, they're wild. They breed here; won't hatch anywhere else. And if we let the Crizotes keep spreading, they won't have anywhere to hatch. I'm surprised nobody from the city's spotted the infestation yet; we aren't that far. C'mon, let's head back to the TARDIS. It's a local infestation; we'll quickly have it cleared up."_

_Except they discover why nobody's taken care of it when they pop into the nearest city: the buildings, made (grown, the Doctor says) from an organic material are the same colour, sagging and weeping a thick grey liquid. When Martha peers in a building, it's filled with a sticky white foam, and the Doctor quickly grabs for her hand before she can touch it._

_"Eggs. They've covered all the living lifeforms, and now they're starting their breeding cycle. Come on, we've got to get back to the TARDIS before they can-"_

_Suddenly, the foam teems with black specks, growing larger as Martha watches._

_"Martha!" He drags her away from it, heaving bodily, with a strength she hadn't known he had. "They don't just eat plant life."_

_She spots one of the fallen butterflies in the street near the TARDIS, the size of a bus, its colourful wings crumpled. A chitinous bug larger than she is sucks at the body with a needle-like proboscis; the body deflates, then reinflates before bursting at the seams with more of the foam._

_"They suck the juices up, then regurgitate the nutrients and lay their eggs in it. The larvae feed on the foam. Our only hope is seeding the clouds with a concoction to weaken the cocoons while they're pupating." He's at the console, tapping frantically._

_"But what about the butterflies?"_

_"Nah, they use plant material for their cocoons; the Crizotes make a hard shell from their own saliva and shed skin. It's...well, it's kind of gross, actually. But much easier to isolate and affect from a chemical perspective. C'mon!" He grabs her hand again (Martha always gets a thrill when that happens, even in the middle of danger - maybe especially in the midst of danger) and tugs her down the corridors of the TARDIS to what looks like an overgrown version of a child's chemistry set._

_Together they make batches and batches of the solution, and then they commandeer a butterfly to fly high above the clouds, pouring it into the billowing white puffs. A simple atmospheric excitation from the TARDIS, once they're back inside, and it starts pouring buckets._

_"Best to stay inside," the Doctor warns Martha. "It's harmless to humans, but- well, who knows what sort of unexpected side effects it might have. Could turn your skin green for weeks." They're parked on a cliff, overlooking one of the flower fields. This one is unscathed by the blight, the petals shining wetly in the rain, still jewel-toned. Even in the gloom of rain, it's one of the most beautiful things she's ever seen. Her cheeks are still flush with colour from the excitement of riding one of the Aripoae earlier, and she sits there, in the door of the TARDIS, with her arms wrapped around her legs and her chin on her knees, simply soaking up the sight. There are times when she never wants this to end._

She looked up from the fire, blinking away the spots in her eyes, and caught a glimpse of Steve lurking at the edge of the crowd, arms folded over his chest. He didn't seem to be very impressed by the story she'd told. The children crowding around looked awed; even the adults seemed glad for a story of something else, a chance to escape the hell their lives had become. And there was something else she'd planted: a glimmer of hope, the knowledge that if the Doctor had saved so many species, there was a chance that he might save theirs, too. Satisfied, she rose to her feet, handing her still-full cup of broth to a little girl with curly brown hair sitting next to her, and smiled at everyone.

The crowd parted before her, like the Red Sea parting for Moses; Martha always felt a little giddy and exhilarated when this happened. It was a heady experience for a moment, until reality grounded her again. She'd made these people's lives better, but her visits always brought a real danger with them, too. She knew that people had been killed for sheltering her, that the Master was always searching for her, trying to stop her. She'd only just made it out of Japan, hiding on an oil tanker headed south as plumes of smoke rose above Osaka, the entire city - the entire country - one great funeral pyre. The weight of the world rested on her shoulders; she was responsible for so many deaths, so much blood on her hands, that sometimes she just wanted to stop everything, to run and hide so that nobody else could die for her. Maybe, if she ran far enough-

But she always came to her senses. Running wasn't an option, not while the Master had her family. She'd got them into this, and she had to get them out of it. She set her shoulders and moved on to the next barracks.

Five performances later, Martha was exhausted, and the people gladly made room for her to spread a blanket out. Steve made sure she took a spot next to a wall, and laid down next to her, without bothering to pad his resting place against the dirt. He pulled a protein bar from his pack, unwrapped it, and began chewing on it.

"You're eating _more_?" Her voice was quiet, but she didn't try to hide the surprise in her voice. She had noticed that he'd eaten the food offered to him every time.

"I'm hungry," he replied defensively. "That broth isn't exactly filling."

"Most people would've only had one serving of it; you had six. You're _supposed_ to turn it down - they don't need to feed you out of their own rations." Martha was irrationally irritated by what she saw as greed. Everyone was hungry, and these people had to perform hard manual labour tomorrow. They didn't.

"I have a medical condition," he explained awkwardly, fumbling his spoon and dropping it into the bowl. "Higher metabolism. I have to eat more-"

"Bollocks. I'm a medical student, you can't fool me with that." She cut him off with a hissed whisper. Though her voice grew quieter, her anger was more heated, and her words came out from between clenched teeth.

"You said you were a doctor."

"No, I said I was behaving like a doctor. That's not the point."

"The point is, I have an enhanced metabolism and I'll starve to death if I don't eat more than the average person." His voice, on the other hand, was a low rumble. "You think I want to take these folks' food? I grew up poor in Brooklyn, but my mom never begged for food, was too proud to take it even when it was offered. So was I. I can't carry enough rations for myself; I need to take whatever I can get when I can get my hands on it. I hate seeing these kids go hungry, Martha, because I know exactly what it's like. You think I would take the food from their mouths if I had any other option?" 

"Why the hell would they send someone to keep me safe if you're just going to starve to death along the way?" Martha didn't know who had sent him - she never knew anyone in the resistance beyond her immediate contacts - but her irritation quickly shifted from Steve to the faceless person above him.

"Because I'm the best person there was to send." It was spoken without the inflated sense of self-worth that she would have expected to hear in his tone; it was a simple fact. "I was the only person to send."

"We'll find something else for you to eat tomorrow." The thing about Martha's anger was that while it was quick to flare up, it was extinguished equally quickly if she was proven to be in the wrong - which, she had to admit, she was. "I wanted to stay another day, but there are shipments going north and south tomorrow. It's a good opportunity to mislead anyone trying to follow us, and I don't want to miss it."

"Which way are we going?"

Martha made a face. "I don't know enough about America to decide. I need to get to New York, then Rio." She had deliberately chosen two port cities for the location of her so-called weapon parts, although she planned to travel overland to Rio, down the Eastern Seaboard and through the South, into Mexico and Central America. Visiting larger cities meant more opportunities to confuse her trail, and she didn't doubt the Master had people doing their best to track her.

"If you do this sort of thing at every camp, they'll expect you to go south," Steve decided. "More opportunities there."

 

Which was exactly why she _needed_ to go south, but she couldn't tell him that. "So you think north?"

"Other thing is that if we head across the Southwest, it'll be hard to find food and water. Towns are few and far between, and it's a desert out there. I didn't have any training on how to survive in the desert; I'd feel more comfortable if we took the other route."

That was a legitimate problem, and after the Australian Outback, Martha had learnt that she couldn't discredit the importance of a water supply. "Seattle it is, then." She didn't have any intention of crossing the border into Canada (not that borders meant anything anymore), but sticking north for a bit seemed like a good plan, especially if the other option was facing dehydration in a desert. East would have been best, but nobody was taking cargo east anytime this week, or so the man she'd spoken to earlier had told her. He was the one who would be driving their truck full of parts in the morning, and she hoped he was reliable.

 

"Did he say how long this would take?" Steve was lodged in between two crates, eating another protein bar - his second in the two hours they'd been awake.

"We're supposed to get there sometime tonight." Martha had wrapped her blanket around herself; there was a chill in the autumn air. "Hopefully. With the state of the roads these days, though, you never know." Most methods of transportation were unreliable, even when used for shipping - the only thing they were used for, since travel was banned. Occasionally, human cargo was moved from one camp to another, in the same trucks used to transport everything else. "He said he'll try to stop if he sees an abandoned petrol station or something, but no guarantee." There was every chance a patrolling Toclafane could catch their driver doing something he wasn't meant to; driving was a good assignment, when you could get it, but it came with risks.

"Wish I had a motorcycle," Steve grumbled. "We could be halfway to New York by tonight."

Martha wasn't terribly familiar with American geography, but she was pretty sure it didn't work like that. "We could be dead by tonight, more like."

"Country's too big; they can't patrol everywhere all the time." Which was a valid point. The Toclafane simply _didn't_ lurk everywhere because they couldn't, and there was no sense in regularly wasting their time flying over mostly uninhabited areas. The middle of America was mostly used for producing food these days; farms were worked communally, and vast swaths of land laid fallow, or so she had been told. "Get a bike, hit the open road, and there's no problem."

"Except food, and petrol, and-"

"You always so practical about everything?"

"Only when my life's riding on it." Actually, Martha _was_ an inherently sensible and pragmatic sort of person - it was one of the things Tish always teased her about. She took everything seriously, didn't take time out to have fun.

Well, she'd gone off and followed the Doctor on a lark, and where had that got her?

"Why do you tell those stories?" Steve asked, as if his thoughts were following hers.

"Because people deserve hope." It was a good answer, technically true, even if it wasn't the whole truth. "Because they need to believe he can be beaten." Much closer to the truth, even if he wouldn't believe it if she came out and told him. "Because if we give up, then what do we have left?"

"Symbols are good, but-" Steve made a vague, frustrated gesture. "They don't _do_ anything. Yeah, people like 'em, but-"

"You don't think the Doctor is real?" She arched an eyebrow.

"Come on, what kinda name is the Doctor?"

"The same sort as the Master. The kind they chose themselves." She hadn't believed it at first, hadn't believed him when he'd told her his name. But over time, Martha had come to learn that he embodied everything she thought _should_ be true about the medical profession, everything she herself dreamed of becoming someday.

And the Master - well, that was obvious.

"Okay, so say the Doctor is real-"

"-which he is-"

Steve continued as if she hadn't interrupted him. "Why the Jules Verne stories? I mean, they're great and all, don't get me wrong. I loved those kinds of books when I was sick in bed as a kid because they took me out of the crummy tenements I lived in. But that's all they are, stories."

"If that's what you want to think." She didn't need him to believe that she had actually experienced the things in her stories - she didn't even need him to believe in her. She needed people to believe in the Doctor.

"I think you need stories about winning wars. Stories that make people want to fight back - the little guy triumphing over the big guy. That's what people want. You need a soldier, not a doctor." 

"Where would fighting get anyone?" She'd seen people try to fight against the Master's regime. They were all slaughtered like cattle. The resistance wasn't a rebellion so much as it was just people defying him in small ways, because they had to, because the human spirit had to stay alive. "A doctor fixes things - makes things better. A doctor heals. A soldier destroys, and people have seen enough destruction. So I tell people about times the Doctor has saved the day, times when he's won. Times when he's made things better. You don't need guns and weapons to defeat someone like the Master. Sometimes, what you really need is a simple idea."

"Yeah, well, a few tanks wouldn't hurt, either." Steve laughed bitterly. "But you just got me, I guess. Lucky you."

"A soldier." Her mouth twisted wryly.

"Super-soldier." That sparked off a memory in Martha's mind, something familiar, but she couldn't quite place a finger on it. She was about to ask him about it when the truck rolled to a halt. She tensed, shifting so she was hidden by the cargo crates, shook her head at Steve when he made a move to draw the gun riding at his hip.

The door swung open, and their driver peered in. "Found an abandoned gas station up here. Looks pretty untouched, if you wanna see what you can grab. Anything you can spare for me'd be appreciated."

He would get extra supplies, either for his family, or to barter away for something he needed; that was how this worked. And they would get provisions to make their way along the road, and hopefully keep Steve fed. Martha hardly ate anything these days; she was used to going without. She could probably carry some extra food for him, plus whatever she needed for herself, as long as it was lightweight.

She hopped out of the truck, Steve giving her a hand down from the ledge before he went to the door of the petrol station. It was an automatic door; he eyed it for a moment before he pried his fingers into the cracks, pulling it open. She held back and let him take point, making sure everything was clear before he gestured for her to come in.

It was a lucky find, preserved largely by the desolation of the area they were in. Roving bands of looters hadn't made it this far out - Steve thought they were probably somewhere in Oregon by now, although he wasn't sure. He marveled at the variety of food available - sure, they'd had stuff like this before he'd gone under, but not like they did these days. Martha went for the limited medicine available first, scooping up bottles of pills, tubes, whatever she could cram into her coat pockets. He reckoned those were probably for the driver. He took his pack off, his shield already on one arm, and unzipped it, tossing in more protein bars. They were awful, but he knew they'd keep him alive - and he'd eaten far worse. Hell, he'd had worse Army rations in the war. Martha had moved onto the nuts and trail mix now, stuffing packages in her own nearly full pack with a brisk efficiency. She knew what she was doing, at least - but she wouldn't have survived six months on her own if she didn't.

She was an enigma, that was for sure. He didn't fault her visiting the labour camps; maybe it was inefficient, but if she felt that was what she needed to do, then he would just put up with it. It made his stomach turn, personally; it reminded him too much of the camps he'd seen during the war, the ones he'd helped liberate. This entire thing was like Europe on a worldwide scale, like he'd been brought back from the dead into his own personal hell, and he was powerless to stop it. (He was Captain America, goddamnit, he wasn't _supposed_ to feel powerless.) If that was how it made him feel, and he was a professional soldier, then he didn't know how Martha thought she was going to stop the Master.

She seemed so confident about her ability to succeed in her mission. She was going to kill the Master, and yet, she didn't even carry a weapon to defend herself. Something about that didn't quite add up to Steve. He ripped open a bag of jerky, shoving some of the dried meat into his mouth, and then-

And then a gunshot rang out. He instinctively grabbed Martha, threw her to the ground, put himself in front of her and crouched behind his shield.

"Who fires a gun anymore?" she hissed. "It'll bring them down on us and- are you seriously trying to protect us from a gun with a shield?"

"Vibranium." He used as few words as possible, trying to stay quiet, listening for the telltale sound of shoes crunching on gravel, for _anything_ that might give the shooter away. "Can't be damaged by guns."

A rapidfire series of shots echoed, but none of them were aimed at them; the glass of the storefront remained whole. They waited ten minutes, fifteen, but there was nothing but silence. 

Finally, Steve edged out from behind the shelf and out through the doors, staying low to the ground, presenting the smallest target he could. Outside, everything remained as deserted as it had been before, with no sign of life. Their driver's body slumped against the side of the truck, a single bullet hole through his forehead; the other shots had gone into the tires of their truck.

"Someone doesn't want us going any farther," he told Martha. "The resistance would've left the driver alive, right? Shot the tires out, taken him in to protect him."

"Or else they didn't know about us and they aren't affiliated with the resistance. If they just wanted something else, something he was carrying, then-"

"Then why shoot the tires if he was already dead? They had to know we were here, and they wanted to keep us from taking the truck ourselves."

"So we're going to be on foot instead." Martha sounded resigned to the eventuality. "Crossing land neither of us know anything about, with someone hunting us. That more or less sums up the last several months of my life quite well, actually."

"Yeah, but this time you've got me around." Steve gave her a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. This wasn't the war he was used to; this time, the stakes were higher, and he didn't know how to play the game. But it was going to be a hell of a ride trying.


	2. two

_November 2008, somewhere in Colorado_

"If I'd known I would be crossing the Rocky Mountains in winter, I would've-" Martha paused, throwing another pine branch onto the fire. "I don't know what I would have done. Raided a camping store back in San Francisco for a decent coat, for one."

"Could be worse." Steve shrugged phlegmatically. "You ever been in Russia in winter? Trust me, you don't want to." 

"Oh, brilliant, I'm not making the same mistake Napoleon and Hitler did. You're right, that really does make me feel _loads_ better." The only good thing was that the tension between the two of them had eased as they'd continued to travel. Martha couldn't keep up with the ground-eating stride Steve used, but she didn't complain about it, either. She was used to walking; it was how she'd covered quite a bit of Europe and Asia. They didn't talk much while they walked, to conserve energy, but it wasn't an awkward silence anymore, either. It had settled into something more companionable. She still felt a certain hostility and frustration from Steve sometimes, but it wasn't directed at her; rather, she thought, it had more to do with the situation they were in. And that made sense - quite frankly, she would have been more surprised if he'd accepted things as they were.

"We ought to make Denver in the next few days," Steve offered. "I think we can try to get a ride there, if you want."

Martha chewed on her lower lip, fretting. There hadn't been any sign of whoever was following them since their last encounter, and they'd managed to catch a couple rides through Nevada and Utah without incident. That didn't mean that they weren't still out there biding their time, though. 

On the other hand, it was only November, and she knew the weather was bound to get worse. They couldn't keep walking; they were already slogging through inches of snow on the ground, and she knew they were both risking frostbite on a daily basis.

"Yeah, all right," she agreed finally. "I'm not sure where to go after that; it looks like farmland till we hit the Mississippi." She had discovered that Steve had a small notebook full of carefully drawn maps; while details like terrain and boundaries were unimportant, all of the safe houses and guard posts were marked, every one of the labour camps and factories. It was invaluable, and she would have given anything to have had maps like that in her prior travels.

"Fury said to aim for Iowa; he's got an agent there we can stay with for a bit if it's safe enough." Fury, she'd learnt, was the name of Steve's superior; it sounded to her like he had led an organisation similar to UNIT before the Master's reign. "And since that was pretty much the only advice he gave me about this whole trip, I think it's safe to say we probably oughta take it."

"Fair enough. Maybe we'll be able to resupply there." If not, as she was learning, America was a bloody big place. Maybe this mysterious agent would be able to point them in the direction of another relatively intact cache of food. "Why don't you try hunting for meat?"

Steve gave her an incredulous look. "What part of 'grew up in Brooklyn' don't you understand? Just because I can shoot doesn't mean I know the first damn thing about hunting, especially in the middle of winter. We didn't have to hunt and eat anything in the Army - hell, we barely had time to eat the rations they gave us."

"And we don't really have time now," she admitted, pulling a face. "Fair enough. It was just an idea."

"I've always been a lousy cook, anyway," he added with a rueful smile. "I wouldn't even know what to do with a whole animal if you put it in front of me."

Martha probably could have managed some sort of butchering, on the general principle that hacking an animal apart probably wasn't terribly different to cutting a cadaver open; she could separate meat from offal, at least. She decided against offering that knowledge, lest it seem overly off-putting. "Skin it and cook it on a fire?" she said instead. "That's what they always do in films, anyway."

"You know how to skin a deer?"

"In theory, I imagine it involves making a slit along the animal's sternum, down to the pelvis, slipping the knife under the subcutaneous layer of fat, and then...just sort of cutting from there?" She made a helpless sort of gesture. "We didn't learn anything about _skinning_ in medical school."

Well. Not skinning things on purpose, anyway, but she really wasn't going to get into anything like degloving right now. They had a couple cans of soup bubbling in a cast-iron pot over the fire, and she didn't want to put Steve off his dinner.

He stared at her for a moment, blue eyes wide - not with shock, so she'd misjudged him there, but in surprise.

"I expect you would want to sever an artery and hang the corpse to bleed dry first, too. Otherwise it would probably be really messy, and personally, I don't have enough soap for that." She shrugged and stood up to stir the soup.

"Right. I keep forgetting about the doctor thing." He laughed, a little embarrassed, and shook his head. "Can't really wrap my head around that yet. My mom was a nurse, though, so don't think it's anything against. You know. Women in the medical field."

"What?" She froze, giving him a sharp look. Steve hadn't struck her as a misogynist at all in the time they'd been together, and she was a little horrified by what had just come out of his mouth. 

(Oh, god, maybe it was a race thing. But he hadn't given any indication of that being an issue, either, and racism, she'd discovered, was the sort of thing that had a nasty way of slipping out sooner rather than later.)

"If this is about my skin-" she began awkwardly.

"No, no, it's not!" She was fairly certain the expression on his face mirrored her own, his fair skin blotching in embarrassment. "I really think it's great that you have so many opportunities available to you these days, don't get me wrong! I'm sure you've overcome a lot of adversity to get where you are, and-"

"Please, just _stop_ talking." Martha covered her face, more from sheer second-hand embarrassment than any particular feelings of her own. "I don't even know what you're saying or why you're saying it, but it's completely ridiculous, and just- no."

"What did I say wrong? Look, I served with a black fella in the Army, I promise it's not about your skin colour. I'm not that kind of guy, Martha." He reached out to pull a hand away from her face, wrapping a hand around her wrist.

"Well, you bloody well sound like it!" She tried to yank her wrist free, but couldn't break his grip. "Do you know, I had to spend _months_ hiding in 1913. And because of my race, I couldn't pretend to be the Doctor's wife or sister or any other sort of female relative. No, I had to be his bloody _maid_!" she hissed. "A maid at a boarding school for rich white boys, who would make monkey sounds at me, or tell me that my skin would rub off on what I was cleaning, or call me names that they had been taught were perfectly acceptable. I was a woman, and lower class, and even the adults treated me like I was something that they'd scraped off the bottom of their shoe. Even _he_ did, because he didn't remember who I really was." And that was the betrayal that had hurt most of all, the one that made it impossible to ignore the rest of them. "So you'll forgive me if I have a problem with you pretending you aren't racist by making a big deal about how wonderful it is that a black woman can be a doctor, because that is _every bit_ as insulting to me as anything else I went through."

"You were never in 1913."

"Is that honestly the _only_ thing you took away from that?" Martha let out a frustrated screech, finally using her other hand to pull her wrist free. She was incredibly tempted to pick up one of her boots and throw it at Steve's stupid head, but she refused to stoop to that level, no matter how he deserved it. "Because if it is, then you can just leave now. I'm tired of you not believing me, and I'm sure as hell not going to put up with you thinking I'm some sort of trained animal." Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. She'd grown to like Steve as they'd travelled together; he had a dry sense of humour about things that she appreciated. He treated her as an equal - or, at least, he had been till now. She'd thought they were friends, and his stubborn idiocy hurt her more than she wanted to admit. "Yes, I was in 1913, and I was on the moon, and I've been to the future and the past and planets you've never even heard of. The planet is ruled by an alien, so I suggest you pull the stick out of your arse, open up your mind, and get the hell over it!"

"You sound like a girl I used to know." Even in the heat of her rage, Martha could hear the sad tone in Steve's voice. Even so, she couldn't resist a pithy rejoinder.

"Did she push you off the side of a mountain? Because that's what I'm about thirty seconds away from doing right now."

"No, she." His broad shoulders slumped, silhouetted against the firelight. "It doesn't matter what happened to her. She's gone now."

Martha almost felt bad for her remark, seeing that it was clearly a sore spot for Steve. Almost.

"How old do you think I am?" he asked quietly, still facing the fire.

"Early twenties?" His face was young - maybe made him look younger than he was, and she thought about revising her estimate upward.

"I turned ninety in July."

"Wouldn't have put you at a day over seventy-five." She tried to sound flippant about it, but her heart sped up a little. Was he another time traveller? If so, then why did he so vehemently deny her own experiences. "How?"

"You really haven't figured out who I am, huh?" He turned his head, giving her a puzzled look over his shoulder.

"Uh, you're a bloke named Steve. That's not exactly a lot to go on." Martha rolled her eyes. The last thing she needed was for him to develop a huge ego into the bargain. Maybe he thought he was famous, but she sure as hell didn't recognise him.

He reached for the shield he wore over his pack, turned it to face her. "Look at the design," he urged her. "C'mon, doesn't it look familiar?" He laughed suddenly, and the sound was bitter. "Maybe I'm crazy, and history's forgotten me. But I thought-"

It was a star inside two concentric circles. Martha knew she'd seen it before somewhere, but-

She stared at a scratch in the paint that revealed red and blue vibranium underneath. "Wait." God, she'd seen a picture in a history textbook somewhere. Something about the liberation of Europe during World War Two, and he'd mentioned being a super-soldier, hadn't he?

"Captain America?" she hazarded a guess.

Okay, that was a little embarrassing. She'd been travelling with America's most famous hero for weeks and hadn't managed to work it out. But, to be fair, she _was_ English, and history hadn't been her strong point till she'd started experiencing it first-hand.

"Yeah." Steve fell silent for a moment as he stared into the fire. "I was on ice for sixty years, and they only found me four months ago. So I know it doesn't make what I said any better, but I'm still learning about things. Hell, I don't really have any idea what happened while I was under - that wasn't pertinent information when they woke me up. Still isn't, I guess."

"We landed on the moon." Martha took a few steps forward, sat down next to him. "1969. Well, I say we - Americans. There was a space race between the US and the Soviet Union." Which she'd learnt about quite thoroughly while stuck in 1969 for a few months. She'd watched the moon landing a few times, too - on the moon - but wasn't going to mention that. "If you're planning on eating that, you probably ought to take it off before all the broth boils down."

He used a hook next to the fireplace to snag the pot, used a ladle to portion the soup evenly between two bowls. Martha made a face at him and dumped roughly half her soup into his bowl.

"The Vietnam War," she continued. "The eighties - that was really kind of a whole thing in and of itself, pretty wild. Erm. The fall of the Berlin Wall-"

"There was a wall in Berlin?" Steve was already shoveling soup into his mouth, even though it had to be boiling hot.

"Right, yeah, I sort of skipped about twenty years there at the beginning." She made a face. "God, I'm the wrong person to be asking about this; I'm terrible at history. So the Soviets ended up making it all the way to Berlin by the end of the war, and they didn't really want to leave. The Americans and Britain made a pact with them and split Europe in two, more or less, and the division became known as the Iron Curtain. They built a wall in Berlin to split the two halves of the city, to keep people from fleeing the Soviet side to the western side. They covered it in barbed wire, posted guards along the whole thing, and still people managed to sneak through to freedom. That lasted till...the end of the eighties, I guess? The Soviet Union dissolved and Russia became democratic again."

"So the Russians captured Hitler?"

Oh, god, had they seriously told him nothing after thawing him out? Obviously someone had told him that the Allies had won the war, but other than that, he seemed to be clueless. (To be fair, it was more or less a moot point now.)

"No, he killed himself in his bunker." Martha made a face. She and the Doctor had largely steered clear of both world wars, and for good reason. "Germany surrendered after that, and then America dropped the atomic bombs on Japan later-"

"The what bombs?"

She was on _slightly_ more solid ground with this, if only because she had a basic knowledge of physics. "Atomic bombs. Nuclear weapons. Erm. When you split an atom...no, wait. Okay, so atoms _basically_ consist of three smaller particles, protons, electrons, and neutrons. The centre of the atom, the nucleus, is all the protons and neutrons packed together, while the electrons surround the nucleus in a cloud. So when you split an atom, the free neutrons act like ping-pong balls, and they bounce away and hit other atoms of unstable elements, which causes their nuclei to do the same thing, and it causes a chain reaction that releases massive amounts of energy - basically, a huge explosion vastly more powerful than any sort of traditional bombs."

The spoon clattered against the side of Steve's bowl as he dropped it. "And America dropped these bombs on Japan?" It sounded exactly like what HYDRA had wanted to do to America, and the thought of his country deciding to do the same thing made him sick to his stomach. He knew, logically, that there must not have been any other option, that an invasion of Japan must have been out of the question for some reason, but-

But to do that to civilians? He had seen the aftermath of Dresden, had been haunted by nightmares about it for days afterwards. There were some things that couldn't be justified, even in wartime.

"I know, it's awful." Martha's voice was low and quiet, and she reached over to take Steve's hand. "But no nuclear weapons have been used in any war since then. It's - well, there's a concept called mutually assured destruction that led to the Cold War."

Steve's head was swimming from all the information, but he nodded anyway, even though he didn't have any idea what the Cold War was.

"America and the Soviet Union spent decades in a standoff because they knew that if one of them fired nuclear weapons, the other would fire back. That's why it was the Cold War, because it never went 'hot', so to speak." She squeezed his hand. "I'm sorry I'm telling you such awful things."

"You ever think that maybe we brought all this upon ourselves?" He gestured with his free hand, indicating their current situation. From the way mankind acted, it sure as hell sounded like it.

"No." Her voice was remarkably strong in that one word. "The Master would kill every single one of us if he could, and he doesn't care. And for everything we've done, I don't think we deserve it. I don't think people deserve to be herded into camps and forced to work. I don't think they deserve to be slaughtered en masse - you _saw_ what Hitler did, I know it, and this is worse. On the day he took power, he killed a tenth of the world's population, just because he _could_. The gutters literally ran with blood, the bodies were everywhere. People killed where they stood, chopped to pieces like mincemeat. And he hasn't stopped since. He firebombed Japan as I was leaving. I saw people burning to death, trying to run to safety, and I couldn't stop and help because I had to get out of there. I had to keep myself alive while everyone else was screaming and dying, and the only thing I could do was promise to make him pay for it later. There are people slowly starving to death, people being irradiated as they harvest fuel for the ships he's building, people who are killed for the slightest infraction of the rules, people dying of diseases that would be easily treated otherwise. No matter what sins we've committed, and there are plenty you don't know about, probably more that I don't know about, we don't deserve _this_." 

By the time she finished speaking, tears slowly trickled down her cheeks, and she'd set her bowl aside, her meal forgotten. Steve reached out with an arm and tugged her close to him without a thought. She was a civilian, and she'd never agreed to this, never thought about the horrors she'd be exposed to. He was a soldier, and he'd been sickened by the camps; he couldn't think about how much worse it must have been for her. And to keep going through it all, completely by herself? Well, it took chutzpah, as his Yiddish friends would have said. 

"Why are you doing this?" He gladly would have taken her burden from her - hell, that was what he was supposed to do; he just needed to find out the location of the parts first.

"Because it needs to be done." Martha's voice was barely a whisper. "And I'm the only one who can do it." She hesitated for a long moment. "Because he has my family and friends, and I don't know if they're dead or alive, but it's the only way I can get them back."

Somehow, he hadn't thought about that. He'd thought that maybe it was revenge for something, because otherwise why would someone so utterly unqualified travel across the world on such a crazy mission, but the thought that the Master had _prisoners_ hadn't occurred to him.

"Is it okay if I just-" Martha looked up at him with wide eyes, and Steve couldn't figure out what she wanted. For a second, he entertained the crazy idea that she was asking if she could kiss him, but it wasn't really a kissing kind of conversation.

"What?"

"Cry," she whispered, and her face crumpled suddenly. _Shit_ , Steve thought, and acting more on instinct than anything else, he brought his other arm around her in an embrace, pulling her to his chest as her shoulders heaved with sobs. It was kind of awkward - god knew he'd never held a woman like this before - but it was the first time Martha had shown any sort of vulnerability in front of him. She'd been talking about bleeding and skinning animals just a few minutes ago, shouting at him for being racist just after that, and this entire time, she'd been acting tough and competent and smart. 

She hadn't allowed herself to be vulnerable, he realised, because she'd known what would happen. Because when she'd been travelling by herself, breaking down like this was a luxury she couldn't afford. She'd had to keep going, repress everything, do her best to ignore the horrors she saw. She'd built up a suit of armour for herself and sealed all the chinks, locked herself inside. She only allowed herself this one moment now because she trusted him, and somehow he knew that after she was done, it wouldn't happen again.

So he let her cry all the tears she'd pent up for months, all the emotions she'd felt spilling out, until she was exhausted, until she fell asleep, her head still nestled against his chest.

Yeah. Okay. This was really awkward.

He knew that if he moved to put her down on her blanket, she would be awake in an instant; they'd spent a couple nights sleeping outside, and he had seen her do just that when there was a strange noise, when something wasn't quite right. And she deserved whatever sleep she could get - unlike him, she needed a normal amount of sleep, something neither of them ever got. He could sit here all night if he had to; he'd been planning on spending part of the night outside to keep watch. Instead, he carefully, slowly, reached for his bowl of soup, easing the arm away bit by bit so she wouldn't notice. He eyed the spoon, decided it wouldn't work, and drank it from the bowl instead. It had gone cold by now, but it wasn't the first time he'd had cold soup. It wasn't the greatest, but he'd live.

Steve let himself fall into a sort of trance for the next several hours, aware enough of his surroundings that he could react instantly if he needed to, but letting his mind and body relax. Letting his mind wander led to thinking, and he didn't like to be left alone with his thoughts these days. Especially not in a place like this, with the cold and the snow outside. Hell, Martha had probably done him a favour by falling asleep in his lap; standing watch out in the snow would have led his mind down dark paths, the sort he couldn't let himself follow right now, not if he wanted to be able to do his job.

As the first rays of dawn crept over the horizon, slanting through the windows and onto the rough wood floorboards, Martha stirred on his chest, letting out a sleepy sigh. She stretched like a cat, then lifted her head, blinking with confusion for a few seconds before realisation hit her.

"Oh, god." She groaned, burying her face back in his chest briefly before evidently deciding that was a poor decision, too, and pulling away quickly. "I'm so sorry, Steve. I didn't mean to fall asleep on you like that - you should have just moved me."

"It's fine," he reassured her. In fact, it was rather less fine now that she was moving, and he needed to get her off his lap shortly before she figured that out. "I'm gonna-" He gestured vaguely. "Go outside." 

Another embarrassed blush - Martha must have figured that she had kept him from emptying his bladder for several hours - and she quickly shifted out of her position. Steve flashed her a grateful smile and stood, grabbing his coat from where he'd left it.

More snow had fallen overnight, a fresh inch added to the blanket already on the ground. If they didn't make it to Denver soon, they might never make it out of the mountains. Steve was used to operating in snow, but they weren't really outfitted for it, and he knew things were only going to get worse. God, he hated snow, but at least the crisp morning air was helping him cool down. This wasn't like the Alps - or that was what he was telling himself, anyway. Whether or not it helped was another thing entirely.

He walked around the cabin, his boots crunching in the snow. Everything seemed undisturbed; he was just about to go back inside when his eyes caught a depression in the snow under a cedar tree. There was a single bootprint, the edges crisp and precise. Not his, and too big to be one of Martha's. He circled the tree in a wider and wider radius, but didn't find anything else.

It was impossible. Had to be. Nobody could have only left a single bootprint in the snow as evidence. Maybe his brain was playing tricks on him. Steve shook his head, used one gloved hand to brush the snow clear. 

There was a sound in the tree above him. He tipped his head up slowly, met a pair of brown eyes above the elongated muzzle of a sniper rifle.

His shield was inside.

Steve jumped, grabbing not for a branch, but for the gun. He got his fingers around the barrel and let gravity do the rest of the work - but the man holding the gun had already let his weapon go and dropped to the ground. He met him in a crouch under the tree; he had already pulled a knife. Steve had left his sidearm inside, but still had a knife in his boot. He wasn't the greatest at knife fighting, but Bucky had taught him a few things he'd learnt on the streets of Brooklyn.

He shifted into an easy stance, studying his opponent. He had a black balaclava wrapped around his nose and mouth, topped by flat brown eyes that held no sign of emotion. Stringy unwashed dark brown hair fell to his shoulders, and one of his arms had been replaced with a metal prosthesis. Did they have robot arms now? He made a mental note to ask Martha about that.

Steve dropped the gun - it was useless at such a close range - and kicked it away. The other man leapt for him as he did, but Steve had already dropped to the ground. It was an obvious move, telegraphed by the tensing of the muscles in his stomach. His opponent was testing him, trying to see how good he was, which meant that he was probably going to have to do a hell of a lot of bluffing.

He rolled away and back onto the balls of his feet, and the man rushed him. No finesse there, just pure strength. His momentum and weight pushed Steve backwards, carrying them both into the side of the cabin with a heavy thud. Whoever this guy was, he was _strong_ for his size; not many people could've managed to do that. Steve grabbed for his right arm, trying to pry his fingers between the tendons; he switched the grip of his knife to his left hand and drove the blade into Steve's gut in response, then plucked Steve's blade from his hand.

"Steve?" 

Oh, _fuck_.

"Grab the gun. Get behind the shield," he wheezed. It wouldn't protect her for long, but it might keep him off her long enough for him to buy time.

Martha grabbed the gun by its stock distastefully, threw it in the cabin - Christ, had nobody taught her how to handle a loaded weapon? - and darted back inside as Steve's knife hit the doorframe.

It wasn't a killing shot. He could tell this guy would have _made_ a killing shot. Hell, it wasn't even a crippling shot. He wanted to scare her off to concentrate on fighting him.

Not that it was a fair fight right now, with his knife in Steve's gut. Steve could feel muscles tear as he moved, gritting his teeth to push the man off him. He slipped a leg in between his thighs, wrenched in a way he probably shouldn't have, but it managed to get him to the ground for about three seconds.

Steve took a deep breath, pulled the knife out. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but it meant that he was armed. Of course, it also meant the flow of blood was no longer staunched by the blade. Probably not his greatest plan.

"You're here for me, not him."

" _Martha_ -" Suicidal actions were the last thing he needed. He turned his head to look, saw her crouching low behind his shield in the doorway. 

The other man seemed to disregard her entirely, took advantage of his distraction with a blow to the throat that made Steve's vision go black for a second. But he _had_ to be here for Martha, he thought. Nobody even knew he was alive, apart from Fury. He didn't matter in all this.

He struck out blindly with his knife, scored a hit through layers of metal and fabric. Only a glancing blow, but Steve followed it up with a punch from his free hand, then an uppercut to the jaw. The man grabbed his wrist, twisted his arm till his shoulder popped and dislocated. Hell, this was starting to feel like a backalley fight. A blow to the ribs, and he thought he felt a few crack. Steve tried the legs trick again, but it didn't work; he hadn't expected it to work twice. His opponent forced him down onto his back in the snow, and then-

And then he felt metal under his fingers. Steve grabbed the rim of the shield, swung it up into position, catching his opponent under the jaw and throwing him backwards. He dropped the knife in the snow, kicked it over to Martha.

The man crouched under the trees, looking like a feral wildcat. He studied the situation, calculating, spat out a Russian curse under his breath. And just like that, he was gone.

"Jesus," Steve breathed. He put a hand to his side, and his glove came away dark with blood. Suddenly he realised that he could barely stand, that his arm was dislocated, and god only knew what he'd done to his leg. "I think I'm just gonna sit here for awhile." His gaze unfocused for a moment, focused on Martha. Good. She was safe. "Get back in the cabin. Gotta- gotta make sure he doesn't come back."

"That's ridiculous." She came up under his good arm, lifted it over her shoulders.

"You can't do that." She would never be able to haul his weight. Even part of it. Maybe before the serum - hell, he'd outweighed her then, he bet - but now? Wasn't gonna happen.

"Then you're going to have to do something to help me get your arse inside."

"He might come back." The protest was weak. He'd already said that, hadn't he? "Might try to finish the job."

"Don't be daft." Martha tugged on his arm, nudged his hip with hers. Slowly, he took a staggering step. "If he was going to kill us, he would've done it weeks ago."

"Did a pretty good job of trying." Another step. Steve saw red against the snow.

"Not really. Come on, a few more steps." His bad leg nearly buckled; he sucked in a deep breath and instantly regretted it.

"He's gonna have us penned up in here for a week." It felt like a mile to the threshold of the cabin, but Steve and Martha finally crossed it.

"That, I can't really argue with." Martha dragged the cabin's single chair over, positioning it close to the window. Steve collapsed on it gladly, trying to keep his breaths shallow. "I don't know anything about fighting, but nothing he did was even close to lethal."

"Yeah, stabbing people in the gut-"

"Just a flesh wound." She unzipped his coat, carefully unbuttoned the flannel shirt under that. They couldn't afford to waste clothes, but he blinked dazedly as she grabbed the knife from the floor and used it to slice his undershirt. Well, losing one t-shirt probably wouldn't make a difference in the long run. "Your muscle took the brunt of the stab." Martha dragged her pack over, went straight for the pocket in the front. "It's bloody, but if he wanted to kill you by stabbing you in the abdomen, he would have aimed for an organ - probably the liver or the stomach. Or he could have gutted you." She looked at the blade of the knife, tested the edge. "Seems more like a stabbing knife to me, but honestly, the only blades I know about are scalpels."

She used the knife to cut another long slice from his shirt and wet it with water from one of their canteens, carefully scrubbing the blood from his skin. "Hitting the cabin like you did is another story. I'm assuming you've got bruised ribs at the very least, cracked at the worst. A blow like that could have risked splintering the ribs and driving the fragments into your lungs, or cracking vertebrae. Probably would have done to anyone else."

"This isn't sounding real reassuring to me, Martha." Steve couldn't concentrate on what she was saying, but most gals didn't talk about the ways you could have died horribly in a fight, especially in the clinical tone she was using. An Army nurse would have cleaned him up gently while cooing over how wonderful and brave he was. Strangely, he thought he preferred Martha's brisk, clinical assessment.

"Assuming he's the one who killed our driver, he's had at least two chances to kill us, and he hasn't done either time. Either he doesn't want to, or he's keeping us alive for some reason. Playing with us. This is going to hurt," she added, almost absent-mindedly.

"Jesus!" It felt like she was pouring liquid fire into the stab wound. Steve gripped the seat of the chair with his good hand, half expecting to hear the sound of wood splintering.

"Oh, don't be such a baby." She looked up, making a face at him. "Trust me, the next bit is the worst." Martha dug through her kit, coming up with a curved needle and thick black thread. 

"Is that what you tell all your patients? Because I feel like your bedside manner is sorely lacking, Doctor Jones."

"Only the ones who're about to have a puncture wound stitched up without the benefit of anaesthetic. Don't worry, though, a stab wound is nice and short. If he'd sliced you, it would be a hell of a lot worse." Maybe it was because his head was spinning, but he was pretty sure she was secretly laughing at him. "This'll only take a few minutes."

To be fair, she _was_ fast. Steve couldn't see the work she was doing; her head was in the way as she bent over his wound, which was probably for the best. Feeling the needle punch into his skin was bad enough. He gritted his teeth, determined to make it through manfully, pretending he wasn't in agonising pain. It didn't help much, but he didn't really expect it to. The only thing that did help was that he was in pain in too many different places for one to really outdo the other, and that wasn't exactly what he would have called a benefit.

"There." He heard a snip, and Martha pulled back, rolling her head to work out a crick in her neck. "Just have to clean and bandage it, and then we'll be done here."

"I can hardly wait to move on." It was the most injuries he'd had at one time since before he'd undergone the serum treatment; as Captain America, he'd never met anyone capable of beating him up like that guy had. His opponent had matched his strength easily, and Steve hadn't thought that was at all possible.

"That's the spirit." She grinned brightly at him as she taped gauze over the wound. "Now for the shoulder."

"I can-" He started to reach over to do it himself. He'd popped joints back into place before without any problem.

"No, you cannot." Martha grabbed his wrist. "Trained medical professional, remember? Sit back and let me take care of you."

"I bet you-" The shoulder slipped back into place with an agonizing jolt of pain, and Steve had to bite back a string of curses. "That was the gentle way?"

 

"I didn't say anything about gentle. I said trained medical professional, meaning that I know how to do it without potentially causing additional harm."

Yeah, Steve was pretty sure now that she was torturing him on purpose.

"I'm going to need you to take off your trousers so I can look at your leg."

_Definitely_ torturing him on purpose. Steve blushed a bright red as he undid the fly of his jeans, lifting his hips as he slid them down over a swollen thigh. _This_ , he thought, was the problem with lady doctors.

Martha settled down between his thighs, and Steve's blush intensified. He'd never thought of himself as having a dirty mind - not compared to Bucky, anyway - but there was something about having a girl _right there_ that drew his thoughts to certain things. It was better than thinking about how much the rest of his body hurt, but it wasn't exactly appropriate, not with him sitting here in his briefs.

Her hands were cool against his painfully swollen skin. "Another few minutes, and I would've had to cut those jeans off," she commented. At least thinking about that knife cutting the denim away from his thigh - way too close to his dick for comfort - helped. "I think it's either a bone bruise or a fracture." Her fingers palpitated the skin, and even through the haze of blinding pain, he couldn't help but think about how good that might feel under other circumstances. "Your healing is accelerated, right?"

"Uh." It took Steve a moment to process her words. "Yeah, it is."

"A week of bed rest, then." Which they both knew was a week they didn't have, but neither of them mentioned it. Much like Martha - thankfully - wasn't mentioning the burgeoning erection in his underpants. "I'll get some snow from outside and make you a compress. That's about all I can do for it, unfortunately - I'm assuming you metabolise drugs too quickly for painkillers to help?"

He nodded, glad that she was moving away from him. Heavy-duty painkillers might've helped, but he doubted she was carrying any of those with her.

Now that she was standing again, she leaned in, peering at his eyes. She moved aside to let the sunlight hit him square in the face, and he winced at the strength of the light - or tried to, because she was prying his eyelids open with her fingers.

"Yep. Concussion."

"Is there anything that isn't wrong with me?" he grumbled, letting his eyes fall shut once she relinquished her vise-like grip on his eyelids.

"Well, your reproductive system seems to be working just fine." He heard her laugh just as the door of the cabin clicked shut.

_Christ._

 

Martha took the knife with her when she left. True, she was only going just outside the cabin, and she didn't have any idea what to do with it, but at least _having_ it made her feel better. She was more worried than she was willing to let on to Steve; she'd had the Master's minions chasing after her this whole time, but none of them had come so close to catching her. She didn't understand why he hadn't captured her when he'd had the chance - unless he _was_ playing with them, like a cat toying with its prey.

But that didn't make sense, either. The Master was the sort of person who wanted his missions completed quickly. He didn't tolerate failure. Anyone who was ordered to capture her would have brought her to him immediately - the same with simply killing her.

None of it added up. If Steve hadn't been half-addled by the blow to his head, he would have worked it out, too. The Master didn't want anyone to spy on her, didn't want to know what she was doing. He wanted her stopped.

And what was she doing flirting with Steve, anyway? Just because she thought he'd done it first, just because he was incredibly good-looking and male, just because her heart still ached over the Doctor and she wanted to forget him for just a moment. It wasn't appropriate. It was stupid to think about such inconsequential things now, when the fate of the entire world was at stake. She wondered if he thought less of her because of it.

God. She scooped up some snow, pressed it to her cheeks to cool them for a moment. She'd spent the entire time alone thinking about the Doctor, convincing herself to fall out of love with him, even while she told stories about how great he was nearly every night. It had hurt more than anything she'd ever done, and she knew that the worst pain was yet to come. But it had to be done; he would never love her, not the way she wanted. And that was fine, really - he was a great friend. Steve, she thought, would probably be a great friend, too. That was all she could let him be. When all of this was said and done, she would be back in England with her family, and he wouldn't even remember her.

Besides, she thought as she shoveled handfuls of snow into a plastic bag, having sex right now would be...weird? Impractical? All of the above, and more. Never mind what her body thought, she had more self-control than that, no matter how frayed it was after travelling with the Doctor. 

It had probably just been a natural response to having a woman kneeling between his thighs like that, anyway. Nothing personal, just his body reacting the way a healthy male body should. (A very healthy male body, her mind whispered treacherously, thinking about the size of that bulge.) 

When she returned to the cabin, Steve had pulled his jeans back on and buttoned up his shirt again, and he was reclining on the chair. "Here," she said, offering him the shopping bag full of snow. "I know it's not a very good compress, but on the bright side, there's plenty more where that came from."

He let out a small sigh of relief as he placed the bag on his swollen thigh. "I, uh-" Martha could tell he was about to awkwardly stammer through an apology, mainly by the way his ears were already turning red.

"You shouldn't have put those back on." She cut him off briskly. "You're constricting the blood flow to your leg with your thigh swollen the way it is, and there's a chance we'll have to cut them off. If you can still get out of them, I recommend it. I can go back outside, if you'd like." She crossed over to their pile of blankets and tossed one over his lap to protect his modesty.

"I don't-" Steve made a face. "You don't have to go outside in the cold again. I'm gonna need help getting out of this chair, anyway. It'll be easier to get them off if I'm standing up."

She wasn't sure how he'd managed to even put them back on in the first place, but wasn't going to ask. She bent down on his bad side, letting Steve put an arm over her shoulders, and supported him as he stood up. "All right, I'm just going to slide them to your knees." She could do that without shifting her weight too much; any farther, and she would have to bend down.

Martha reached under his shirt, trying to pretend she wasn't blushing as she fumbled with the fly of his jeans and slid the zip down with her fingertips. (Really, she was more professional than this.) She reached around his back with one arm, managing to hook her fingers in the waistband, and tugged the jeans down slowly, getting them over his thigh with difficulty. Once they reached the knee, she could feel the tension in the fabric ease.

"Okay, I think we should be able to get you over by the fireplace now." She could tell that he was keeping most of his weight on his good leg, and she suspected that he was only using her as support because he knew she wouldn't let him try to walk otherwise; he was the sort of stubborn idiot who would have limped his way over on one bad leg and pretended he was fine.

She helped ease him down onto his bedroll, whisking the jeans the rest of the way off and replacing them with the blanket. (It was, in fact, her blanket, but she didn't need it right now, and he did.) "It's too bad we haven't got a kilt," she suggested blandly. "That would be perfect right about now."

"Depends on your definition of perfect. I don't have the legs to pull off a skirt." Steve smiled up at her, and Martha resisted the urge to tell him that he was entirely wrong about that.

"If you meet a Scotsman," she said instead, "never, ever call his kilt a skirt. Not unless you want a black eye." Martha sat down next to him, putting the makeshift compress on his leg again.

"We've got a week of this, huh?" Steve shook his head. "You sure you aren't hiding any crutches in that bag of yours?" He was obviously just as eager to be on the road as she was, and she didn't blame him. The thought of staying here and waiting for their pursuer to return made her intensely uneasy.

"It's not just your leg." She sighed. "Everything needs a chance to heal. That's just what's preventing you from walking. If you fell, you'd risk further damage to all your injuries. Besides, I don't want to put any strain on that wound right now. It'd be minor if things were normal, but if it gets infected..."

"Yeah. I've seen field hospitals before."

"God, what I wouldn't give for a few decent antibiotics," she sighed. "And something to stabilise your femur. And tape for your ribs."

"And if wishes were wings, pigs would fly," he retorted dryly. "Enough to destroy the entire Luftwaffe."

 

Steve hated enforced idleness. He'd had enough of it to last him a lifetime when he was a kid. Sure, he'd devoured every book he could get his hands on, drawn on every scrap of paper he could find, but that still hadn't been enough to keep him busy when he'd been confined to bed. And here and now, he didn't have anything to do but talk to Martha. Which wasn't bad; she was filling him in on as much pop culture and history as she could remember, and he liked talking to her. 

It sure didn't hurt matters that she was easy on the eyes. He wondered sometimes what she would look like normally, well-fed, in pretty clothes and makeup. He wondered if she even wore things like that, or if she dressed severely and practically. But even Peggy had found time to let her hair down and wear a dress now and then.

God, Peggy. He tried to keep himself from thinking about her; he was more than sixty years in the future now. Even if she had been alive before the Master took over - well, there wasn't anyone who was too old to work now. (He couldn't let her memory be tarnished like that. Better to think she'd already died peacefully than murdered by those things.) He'd loved her, and the loss that should have been decades old was still raw and fresh for him. He wanted to go back and give her that dance more than anything else, and he would never be able to.

Maybe someday he'd move on. Or maybe it wouldn't be an issue if he waited long enough. He was a relic in this world; that much was obvious the more Martha told him, talking about terrorists and aliens and technology. The world didn't need Captain America anymore, but maybe there was one last thing he could do for it. 

He didn't feel old in body, but he did in spirit. Nobody knew Steve Rogers, nobody cared about him. Even if things went back to normal - or what passed for normal in this world - that wouldn't change. Fury would keep him around, send him out to do his dirty work, but that was all he was good for.

Hell, he wasn't even good for that right now. He'd been sitting here for five days now, totally useless. If that man came back, he'd be a sitting duck, unable to protect himself or Martha - and as tough as she acted, they both knew she couldn't do anything to defend herself. That was the entire reason why he was here, and he was failing at it completely.

"I need a stick," he told Martha. She'd dozed off again; she'd been spending a fair bit of time napping lately, in lieu of anything better to do. She probably needed the rest, he thought.

She blinked sleepy brown eyes at him, pushing her hair back out of her face. "I don't think you're in any shape to be playing fetch." 

"A big stick, about shoulder height, few inches thick. Nice and sturdy." It had to be, to support his weight.

"You aren't going to listen to me if I tell you this is a bad idea, are you?" Martha sighed and began putting her coat on. "I need to go get more firewood anyway." They'd found a small axe in the cabin, and she'd had to start chopping fallen trees to get wood for their fire.

"Honestly, I'm not sure we have enough food to stay here any longer and still make Denver." Martha could go without - probably would, if she thought he needed it more - but that wasn't as much of an option for Steve. "I'm mostly healed." She'd cut the stitches out yesterday, without any sign of infection; there was still a puckered scab, but the wound had healed cleanly.

"Fine," she huffed, shoving her feet into her boots. "I just want you to know that I think it's a bad idea."

"Look, I just don't like sitting still," he explained. "When I was a kid, I was sick all the time, and I had to spend a lot of time in bed. Even when I got older, there was still asthma to worry about, and let me tell you, in New York, the air was full of smoke. It was hard to breathe a lot of the time, so I was cooped up even then. After the serum, I just- enjoyed being active, getting out and doing things. And when everything depends on time, I don't wanna just sit here wasting it."

"You really just don't want to have to listen to me explain the plot of any more films," she teased him.

"Hey, I thought the whole Star Wars thing was great." He held his hands up defensively. "I just didn't get why they made them in the wrong order."

"Don't worry, neither does anyone else." Martha grinned at him as she slipped out the door.

An hour later, she returned with an armful of firewood and a stick - more likely a sapling that she'd cut down and trimmed. "I feel like a lumberjack," she complained with a grimace. "A very sticky lumberjack."

"I think there might be a height requirement for lumberjacking," Steve replied with a straight face.

"Shut it, you, or your stick's becoming kindling." Martha, he had found, didn't take well to being teased about her height, which meant that he could rarely resist an opportunity to do so. "Anyway, you're the one who looks like the bloke from the paper towel rolls, especially with that beard."

Steve _did_ have a week's growth of stubble on his face, and it _itched_. He had never been able to grow any sort of decent facial hair pre-serum, but apparently that had changed, too. They didn't have a mirror, but he could feel how full it was. "...paper towel rolls?"

"Never mind." She waved a hand. "We can get going in the morning. Maybe soon you'll be able to get enough water to shave - although if you're going for the masculine look, you've definitely got it." 

Was that a hint of approval in her voice? Steve rubbed his beard thoughtfully. Maybe it could stay a little longer.


	3. three

_Nebraska, December 2008_

"We can't go much farther today." Though the snow that had plagued them through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains had melted, the colour of the sky suggested that there was more coming soon, and the wind had picked up over the course of the afternoon. Martha had spent the last hour trying to look for a decent place to stay, but nothing had presented itself.

"You wanna stay outside in this?" Steve cast a dubious look up at the sky. "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

"I'm not sure we've got any other options." They'd stayed outside before, but winter was coming, and they were caught in its teeth. Normally, Martha opted to try and find minimal cover under brush and curl up in her blanket, trying to minimise her visibility. But that was when the weather was good, and this was anything but.

"I've got a tarp in my backpack." Steve gestured to a stand of trees in the near distance, one that looked like it might be around a source of water. "We'll set up camp there; I can rig some poles for a shelter."

"Well, aren't you just a proper boy scout?" Martha quipped. It was, of course, due to his Army training, but she was impressed by his level of preparedness, too. She didn't have a tarp, although it definitely would have come in handy before. She had a plastic poncho that she'd got in Europe; she'd awkwardly curled up and slept under it once or twice before. Survival really wasn't one of her specialities, and it wasn't as if she'd got much of a chance to prepare for this. Everything she had was something she'd picked up somewhere on her trip, usually after she discovered how much she needed it, and sometimes after weeks of scavenging for it. Steve, on the other hand, had been outfitted before he'd met her, and probably from some sort of supply depot. He knew what he was doing out here; he'd survived by himself in war-torn Europe, after all, and had been trained before he'd ever shipped out. She was just learning as she went, and it was probably a minor miracle she'd even made it this far without dying.

With an end goal in sight, they made it to the trees sooner than expected. Steve began cutting saplings to rig up a tent, while Martha rooted through his pack for the tarp. "Canvas?" She'd expected plastic; it was smaller and lighter. Noisier, though; a plastic tarp would have crinkled in the wind.

"It'll keep us warmer. Less likely to blow away in the wind, too." Steve used a nylon rope to lash the poles together, then secured the tarp to the poles through the brass rivets along the outside. "We didn't have plastic tarps in the war; we just used these to make shelters. Kept us warm all through the European theatre."

"Yeah, but you had fires." It was too bloody windy for a fire, especially out on the plains like this. If they tried to start a fire, everything would go up in a flash.

"...yeah." Steve stared down at his feet for a moment. He had to be thinking the same thing Martha was; surviving the night was going to be nigh impossible without a fire. "We're gonna have to huddle together, I think. You saw that space blanket in my pack, right?"

Martha nodded. She'd finally added one to her pack as well, in a survivalist's cabin they'd found in Utah. Steve's was Army issue, the familiar olive colour, and bulkier than hers. It took up more room in his pack, but it was likelier warmer, too.

"Why's it called a space blanket, anyway?" he wondered.

"Dunno." Martha shrugged as she started to root through her pack. She pulled out a handful of chemical warming pads; she already had some tucked in her gloves and boots, but they were exhausted now. "I think they were developed by NASA for use in space." 

She added a couple of MREs to her pile - also from the survivalist's cabin - and some pouches of water before pulling out the blanket. They tried to save the limited MREs for when they needed them most, and this seemed like one of those times.

"What's on the menu tonight?" Steve glanced at the packets. 

"Looks like we've got beef ravioli or Cajun rice and sausage." Martha had to give them credit; there was a decent variety amongst the meals. They were, however, universally unpalatable. 

"And to think, we were excited when they added chicken and vegetables to the C-ration lineup," Steve deadpanned. "Though I don't know what kind of chicken that came from. Mighta just been New York pigeon." 

"I'm not sure what sort of sausage is in here, so obviously the Army hasn't changed too much over the years." Martha picked up the beef ravioli package and the blanket and squeezed herself in under the shelter, tugging her pack so she could position it to block the wind once Steve was in.

"Hey, now, I'm sure food standards have risen over the years. They probably only use the highest grade horse meat." Steve sat next to her, arranging his blanket over both of them. "Nothing's too good for the troops."

"Is that what they told you in the war?"

"Nah, during the war we just pretended it wasn't horse meat." He carefully measured water into the MRE's heating pouch, then put it back in the box with the food and waited for it to heat up. "Or pigeon, I guess."

Martha slipped another heating pouch into her gloves while she waited for her own meal to be ready. "My granddad served in the war. He never talked much about it, just...came home and went on with life like it never even happened. He was in Asia; they didn't let many blacks serve on the European front. Gran said he drove a truck, and that's all I know."

"I don't think many civilians would understand what it's like. He probably thought that he was sparing you by not telling you the details of what happened to him. In war, things that you couldn't imagine in your worst nightmares become your daily reality. You have to live constantly with the knowledge that anyone could die at any time, that the guy you're sitting next to could get a gut full of shrapnel from a bomb, or a bullet to the head, or lose his legs to a mine. And the same thing could happen to you." Steve tasted his food, made a face, and added the tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce to it. "So you come back to the normal world and everything's safe and pretty and clean, and all you can see and hear is death and destruction. You try to push that to the back of your mind, because nobody wants to hear about that. They want to hear about you being a hero and saving the country - but not what you really had to do to keep 'em safe. 

"I talked to a few guys from the first war, old folks who didn't have anyone else. Kept 'em company by playing checkers with them. My dad died during the war, so I thought- talking to them felt like maybe what talking to him would've been like. They told me what it was like, tried to talk me out of enlisting once it started. Not that it made a difference; I couldn't get in, no matter how many times I went through the physical. Not till Dr Erskine gave me a chance for the super-soldier project."

The ravioli was at least slightly edible, Martha thought as she tasted it. "They told you about what it was like and you still wanted to go?"

"I wanted to do my duty." He shrugged. "I wanted to protect the people who needed protecting. Everyone back home who couldn't fight, all the people in Europe who had their countries taken over by Hitler and the Nazis. They all deserved a protector. Someone who was willing to do the things that had to be done so that they could live free."

"I don't like war," Martha said quietly. "I don't like needless slaughter, or pain and suffering. And soldiers - I always thought of soldiers as people who just resorted to violence to solve problems, who excused murder by saying that they were following orders. Soldiers have guns, and they're quick to use them. But you - you carry a shield. Something that's made to protect, not to kill. You aren't just a soldier."

Steve shook his head. "I'm not gonna say I haven't killed anyone. I'm sure that's what you'd like to hear, but- it was a war. There were guys out there who were trying to kill me, and sometimes I had to kill them first. But I tried not to, if I didn't have to. Some of those soldiers were just guys who ended up on the wrong side of a fight, you know? They were kids, just like the GIs in our army. They didn't have a choice. But HYDRA - they did. They knew what they were doing, and they took-" He paused, cleared his throat. "They volunteered, and they deserved what they got. I saw enough HYDRA facilities to know that." 

"I've never heard of HYDRA before." Martha wasn't going to address the rest of what he'd said. She didn't _like_ death or killing, but she accepted that it was sometimes necessary in self-defence, particularly for someone who was in a war. The Doctor would have rejected this philosophy entirely, but - well. Martha was only human, after all. She knew that she wasn't capable of taking a life, but someone like Steve, someone who saw it as his duty to protect others, even if that meant killing on the battlefield? She would forgive that. He was a good man.

"They were the Nazis' secret science division. We had the SSR, they had HYDRA. Except HYDRA was more of a cult than anything else, and they were led by a man named Johann Schmidt, the Red Skull. They developed technology way beyond everything we had at the time, and they tried to develop the super-soldier formula. Schmidt was the first test subject, before Erskine fled to the US. Supposedly they kept trying after they lost him, but I don't know if they were ever successful. They did other experiments, too, beyond anything you heard about with the other Nazi scientists and doctors. Things that never should've been done to anyone living. They wanted to create a new, superior breed of man and rule the world themselves. I stopped their plan; I stormed a facility and stowed away on the plane they were going to use to bomb America. And I fought Schmidt, and-" He closed his eyes. "I brought the plane down so nobody would get hurt. There was no way to land it safely, so I crashed it in the Arctic, as far from anything else as I could."

"So when you said you were on ice-" Oh, god.

"Yeah. Literally buried in ice. Something in the serum kept me alive. I don't know how; you'd probably have a better shot at figuring that out than I would." Steve gave her a wan smile. "Fury found me - well, he had someone else find me - and went up there to dig me out. He said America needed a hero now more than ever. I'm...not sure I agree."

"Heroes aren't always blokes who run around in flashy costumes, you know," Martha pointed out. "Some of them do small things - like everyone who risks their lives to help us. Some of them don't want acknowledgment, because in their mind, it ruins the purpose of what they do. Some of them work quietly, in the background, just saving lives every day. You don't have to do big, dramatic things to be a hero. It's not always necessary to sacrifice yourself to save the world. Heroes aren't always martyrs, and martyrs aren't always heroes."

"What about your Doctor? He sounds like a hero to me."

Martha waved it off with an embarrassed laugh. "He's not _my_ Doctor." Once, she'd thought that he could have been. But not anymore.

"You know what I mean," Steve persisted. "All these stories are centred around him being a hero and saving the day."

"That's just to impress people. I mean, there are plenty of stories about him saving people that aren't half as dramatic, but they don't sound as good. And sometimes- sometimes all he can do is make the best of a bad situation. Sometimes that's all any of us can do, and that's okay, too. Even the Doctor has bad days sometimes." She still wasn't sure if Steve believed that the Doctor existed, or if he thought she was just making the stories up. Considering everything he'd been through, he should have been more receptive to the possibility of a time-travelling alien, she thought wryly.

"Right now, it seems like we aren't having a whole lot of good days." Steve set the waste from his meal aside, drawing the blanket tighter. 

"I can't say you're wrong about that," Martha admitted slowly. Her progress here felt so _glacial_. She knew it was because the population of the United States was more spread out, but she still felt like she was wasting too much time in travel and not having nearly enough opportunities to tell her stories. Everywhere else, she'd simply followed a string of camps - except for Australia, and she really didn't want to think about the mess that had been Australia. She still didn't _remember_ most of Australia. America was different, and it made her worry. She still had five months, but she wasn't sure it was enough, not when each day she spent walking slipped through her fingers like grains of sand, not when she looked at the map and saw how many camps she still needed to visit here. It would be different once she made it to the East Coast; a sizeable chunk of America's population was grouped there. That was where the Master's main workforce was, taking advantage of the factories that already existed, the housing that had already been built.

Still. As long as she was alive, she could keep moving. As long as she was alive, there was still a chance. She wouldn't let that slip away from her. Once she let hopelessness and despair claim her, then she would never be able to escape. Giving up wasn't an option.

"I don't know how you do it," Steve said after a long moment of silence. "All of this."

"Because I have to." She leaned closer to him, taking advantage of the warmth he provided. "Nobody else is going to."

"I could."

"What?" She frowned in confusion for a moment.

"Kill the Master. You can't. No offense, but we both know that. Even for revenge...no."

He was wrong. She could have done it to save her family; Martha knew that as surely as she knew her own name. If it was a choice between her family's lives and becoming a killer, she would have squeezed the trigger in a heartbeat, without even thinking. She hated the Master: Martha was a person who didn't hate, but she made an exception for him, because she'd seen what he'd done, had _lived_ it. 

"Would you have killed Hitler?"

"No." His voice was firm, and the answer came without hesitation. "Not unless I had to. He deserved to stand trial for his crimes."

"Do you think the Master deserves that?" She didn't know exactly what the Doctor's plan was, but she knew it didn't involve killing the Master. Maybe he would put him on trial. Did Time Lords have trials?

"No. I think he's too dangerous to live. Hitler was only a man; he relied on other men, like Schmidt. He wasn't the only one guilty for what happened during the war. But the Master...I don't think there would be a way to contain him. He needs to be put down, any way possible."

Martha closed her eyes. She agreed with him, but she couldn't tell him that, just like she couldn't tell him that she wasn't _really_ trying to assemble a weapon to kill the Master.

"It's my fault," she whispered into his shoulder.

"What do you mean, it's your fault?" She could hear the confusion in his voice.

"He didn't know who he was when we met him, and he had this fobwatch. It was like the Doctor's, the one he used to store his identity when we were in 1913. He couldn't see it, because it had this...filter thing on it, like my key? It kept him from realising he had it. But I asked him about the fobwatch and broke the filter. He opened it, and he became the Master again. He came back to this time and took over the world, and he made sure to capture my family first. He manipulated my mum into telling her all about me and the Doctor, right before he became Prime Minister, and she walked right into his trap. Everything that's happened, it's because of me. So I've got to set it right again."

"Even if it means killing the Master?"

A gust of wind pulled at the tarp; it had been tugging at the edges all through their conversation, ice-cold fingers of air slipping in and prying at their blankets, but this time the wind caught the tarp and belled out the sides. In one swift move, the tarp and its poles were yanked from the ground, blowing away.

"Shit!" Steve swore, at the same time as Martha's "Bollocks!", and both of them sprang to their feet to try and catch the tarp. Freezing pellets of sleet stung her face in the dark, and the wind blew into her eyes, making them water. She didn't have the advantage of speed that Steve did, and she quickly decided it was useless trying to catch up to either him or the tarp.

When he came back, she had a LED flashlight ready for him. The beam of light it produced was small, but through trial and error, they managed to get the tent rigged again, this time putting it as close to the trees as they could, trying to use them as a windbreak. All thoughts of murder were gone; instead they laid together on the cold ground, wrapped in the blankets, desperately trying to get warm again.

"I hate snow," Steve muttered. He shook like a leaf in Martha's embrace, and she didn't think it was because of the cold. He generally seemed less affected by the temperature than she did, and he was putting off enough heat to keep both of them warm. "You should've come in summer. No snow then."

"I was in India during the summer," she informed him. "That's enough summer for a lifetime." Maybe if she kept talking about mundane things, it would distract him from whatever was bothering him. His gaze was distant and unfocused, and she could feel his entire body tensing up. "It's beautiful, but, _god_ , it was hot. Everyone was crammed together like sardines, and it felt like I would never get a breath of fresh air again. Of course, now that weather sounds like heaven to me. I'd love to go back there again someday - maybe when it's cooler." She was rambling now, and she probably sounded stupid, but she didn't care.

"I was in the Alps." He blinked, and his eyes focused on her face for a moment. "It was windy and snowy, like this. We were there to intercept a train that had Schmidt's second-in-command on it, plus a bunch of weapons. It was risky, but everything we did was. But I still should've- I should've-" He cut himself off with a sharp intake of breath.

"You did whatever you could." Martha didn't know the details, but she knew that she shouldn't press him for more. Whatever it was, it had to be traumatic, so meaningless-sounding platitudes would have to do. (She _meant_ it, but without knowing the details, she could only try to sound reassuring.)

"I should've done _more_ , damnit," he growled. "What good is being Captain goddamn America if you can't even save your best friend? The one time it mattered most, and I failed him. He died, and it was my fault." 

"It wasn't your fault," Martha protested.

"He fell from the train - I tried to reach him, but it wasn't enough. I couldn't do enough to save him, Martha, after everything he did for me. I owed Bucky better than that. He should've made it through the war, and instead he died in the middle of nowhere, knowing that his best friend failed him." 

"No." Martha's voice was firm. "He knew the risks and he accepted them so you could finish your mission." She had seen enough people die for her - been forced to accept it herself - to know it. "Steve, I had to walk away from my family to do this. I had to leave them with the Master, and I don't even know if they're still alive. Believe me when I say that you can't let it weigh you down."

Except, of course, that words were easy, and guilt was a burden they were both fated to bear.

 

_Iowa, January 2009_

The thing about the Midwest in winter, Steve had discovered, was that it was so flat that the wind didn't have any obstacles in its path. It blew and blew and cut straight to the bone. He was surprised Martha hadn't already blown away while slogging through the drifts of snow; she was hunched over, making herself even smaller than usual, misery evident in every line of her body.

"We should be just about-" Steve paused and squinted against the blinding white of the snow. There was the smudge of a treeline to the northeast. "I think that's it up there." It had been hard to navigate the plains on foot; they'd mostly used a compass and the few landmarks his maps had shown. Crossing Nebraska had been hellish, and they actually _had_ slaughtered a cow roaming freely at one point, hacking into the meat with their knives and roasting what they could over a fire, leaving the rest of the carcass behind. (They'd paid for the unexpected luxury in the time it had taken them to clean most of the blood from their clothes afterwards.)

"I think you've got icicles in your beard." Martha squinted up at him. He had, in fact, kept the beard after discovering that it kept his face warmer in the winter chill, although he'd had to beg Martha's small pair of scissors, scavenged from a sewing kit, to trim it.

He shook his head. "We need to get you inside." Steve had a higher core temperature, and it made it easier for him to withstand the cold - which was probably why he hadn't died in the Arctic. Martha didn't have that advantage, and they had been walking for hours now, ever since sunrise.

Another hour of walking saw him with Martha in his arms, holding her close to his body to shield her from the cold and hopefully share some of his body heat. The trees rose up in front of them, spindly limbs stretching towards the sky, and Steve prayed they had gone the right way.

An arrow suddenly buried itself in the tree next to Steve, the fletching quivering. He glanced over at it, then up into the trees. With Martha in his arms, he couldn't grab his shield. "Someone out there? Cause I could use a hand here."

There. He spotted someone high up in a tree, perched comfortably next to the trunk, even though the top swayed in the wind. The archer slung his bow over his back and slid down a rope, making his way over to Steve.

"That supposed to be some kind of joke?" His left arm ended above the elbow, with an unusual prosthesis attached - something Steve imagined had to allow him to shoot his compound bow.

"Well, no, I just-"

"Save it. We need to get her inside." He jerked his head. "C'mon, the farm's this way. Fury didn't say you had a beard."

"I don't usually," he tried to explain helplessly, although he was more surprised by the fact that Fury seemed to have communications with this man. That did explain why he'd told them to come here, though.

The woods grew thicker, then opened onto a clearing with a farmhouse and a barn, the lights of the farmhouse glowing through the windows.

"Solar power," he explained, when he caught Steve's questioning glance. "Not that we have much in the middle of winter."

"Do you normally sit out in the woods like that, or were you waiting for us?" They'd been slogging along through the snow since one of the big farms in the middle of Nebraska, and he didn't see how anyone could have got word through to him, not when they couldn't even get a ride anywhere.

"I was hoping a deer would come along, actually. I put some corn out by the edge of the woods yesterday, but nothing's shown up yet, except some birds and the two of you." He shrugged and pushed into the house. "Laura, hon, we've got company. Gonna need blankets for one of them."

An attractive, dark-haired woman came down the stairs, and Steve caught two smaller heads hiding behind her, heads poking through the banister - their kids, he assumed. "Some." Her gaze slid over Steve and Martha. "Come on, we'll get her upstairs. You must be Captain Rogers."

"Just Steve, please." Nobody'd called him Captain Rogers for a long time. "And this is Martha."

"I'm Laura, and-" she paused and glanced at Steve. He must have looked as confused as he felt. "Clint didn't introduce himself, did he?" 

"He fired a warning shot at us," Steve offered.

"Well, with Clint, that's basically an introduction. He used to work for Fury, before all this happened." Laura led them into a bedroom, gesturing to the bed. "Come on, we need to get those clothes off."

"Uh." Steve could feel the blush starting in his face again, warming his numb cheeks.

"And yours too," she added with an appraising glance. "But hers first."

"Right." He tried to pretend that this was perfectly normal, that he'd seen a naked woman in real life outside of the models at art school and the pictures the guys had passed around the barracks. Steve helped Laura peel Martha's sodden coat off, then her boots and socks. She knelt at the end of the bed and began chafing her feet.

"Roll her over and take her top off." Well, at least she was trying to preserve _some_ of Martha's modesty. Steve did as he was told, pulling the flannel shirt up over her head, then the undershirt. His gaze was drawn to three perfectly straight scars crossing her back, like someone had cut her with large knives. They intersected the strap of her bra, going all the way down to the small of her back. 

"I'll get her pants." Laura interrupted his thoughts. "You go find my husband." She drew a quilt up over Martha.

Steve left the room and nearly ran into Clint with an armful of blankets. "Might as well come back in," Clint told him. "We're going to have to get the two of you together to warm you up. I'm going to bring the kerosene heater up, run it for a bit to get some heat in the room." He grinned at Steve suddenly, the first time he'd seen the man smile. "I'll chase Laura out while you get undressed, don't worry."

"I wasn't going to stand there and watch." Laura peered around the doorframe at them. "I need to check on supper, anyway. Bring all those clothes down when you're done so we can put them by the fire to dry."

Steve's head was spinning, and he wasn't entirely certain it was all from confusion. "Do you guys do this a lot, or-"

"Laura used to be a nurse," Clint explained. "I just know how to survive. And how to follow orders." He started layering blankets over Martha while Steve stripped out of his clothes with numb fingers. "I was in Europe when all this began. Had to get back over here - and that wasn't easy. My partner stayed over there to do what she could, haven't heard from her since. I lost my arm just before I got back to the farm, but I got two of those little bastards with EMP arrows. Managed to tie my arm up with a tourniquet and stagger back here. Fury set me up with some gadgets Stark made, said it would keep those things away. He owed me a favour. That answer all your questions?"

"Just about," Steve admitted. He could feel the ache of the cold where his femur had cracked. For a moment, he imagined the cold settling into his bones and radiating outward, the ice freezing over him again. The room spun for a moment, and Clint made a quick move to offer him his good arm.

"Picked a hell of a day for a walk, huh?"

"I think I probably need to sit down," Steve said carefully.

"Yeah, you probably do." Clint eyed the sniper rifle that Steve had carried with him since Colorado. "Didn't know you were much of a shooter."

"Someone was firing at us. I thought I'd take the gun in case it came in handy." Steve made a face as he took his jeans off and swung his legs up into bed. Christ, he was cold.

"Huh." He picked the gun up and made sure the safety was on before he propped the muzzle against the end of the bed and took out the magazine. "Well, I'll be damned."

"What?" Steve sat up.

"You get some rest for now. I'll keep an eye out for you."

 

Martha had never been so cold in her entire life. She was vaguely aware of being put down in bed and undressed, and of someone piling more blankets on top of her later. She curled into a ball, trying to stop shaking; the chill was almost enough to make her cry. In the haze of her brain, she thought about tears freezing as they slid down her cheeks, crystallising on the fabric of her pillowcase. It was absurd, some part of her brain knew. She was inside; her tears wouldn't freeze. But that was how cold she felt, like they would come out of her already solid.

Someone shook her shoulder to wake her, and Martha blinked awake all at once. She tried to sit up, but her muscles refused to cooperate. "I'm Laura," the woman standing over her introduced herself. "And you're Martha; you don't need to try to introduce yourself. I just brought you some broth. You need some hot liquids inside you."

Hypothermia, Martha thought, her brain working a little more. That was the problem. She'd got too cold walking through the snow, and - had Steve carried her? She thought she remembered that. She certainly didn't know how she'd ended up in a house with people. But she obligingly opened her mouth and let Laura spoonfeed her the broth; she already knew that she was in no shape to try and feed herself.

"My husband used to work for SHIELD - the organisation Nick Fury ran. Steve's boss," she added, when there was no sign of recognition in Martha's eyes. "Fury helped us set up this house here. It was just supposed to be our safe space, a place off the grid so his work couldn't follow him home. Now, I guess, it's something more. We have some gadgets Fury gave us that ward off the Toclafane, and we've already got solar panels and a wood-burning furnace. We aren't too bad off here, thank God, so you can stay here for as long as it takes you to recover."

"Steve?" Martha managed to ask finally. The broth was delicious, made from a meat she couldn't quite recognise. More importantly, it was steaming hot, and the heat slid down to warm her to her core.

Laura smiled and patted the lump next to Martha in the bed. "He's not as bad off as you were, but I figured I'd put the two of you in the same bed to try and heat you up. It was either that or Clint," she added with a slightly dry tone, "and trust me, he steals all the blankets."

And, all right, being naked in bed with Steve was probably slightly better than being naked in bed with another woman's husband, although Martha wasn't sure what definition of 'better' was involved there. She resisted the urge to peer under the covers; obviously Steve was just as naked as she was, because they'd both been soaked through from the snow. It was totally innocuous, but it was also incredibly embarrassing.

Although, Martha discovered shortly after Laura left, Steve had apparently overcome his hypothermia, and now he was _incredibly_ warm and radiating heat under the blankets. Drowsily, she pressed closer to his broad, well-muscled back, trying to pretend that she was just cuddling up to a very warm log and not an attractive man. (She wouldn't have cared if he was unattractive, the way he was giving off heat.) It didn't take her long to fall asleep again, her face pressed against the back of Steve's neck.

She didn't know how long she spent asleep; when she woke again, Steve was gone, and the space next to her was devoid of any warmth. Instead, someone had tucked all the blankets around her until she was more or less rolled up inside of them, rather like a burrito. Martha thought about trying to get out of bed, but decided it was far too much effort, and she needed to stay there and husband her strength.

It was ridiculous that she'd managed to succumb to hypothermia. She should have recognised the symptoms earlier, she chastised herself, should have made Steve stop instead of pushing on ahead. Not that they'd had anywhere to stop, but they probably could have cleared the snow to make a fire and warm up, at least, instead of risking life and limb in the cold.

On the other hand, with the weather the way it had been, stopping hadn't been much of an option. They'd needed to get to shelter, no matter what. She was just lucky she'd had Steve with her to carry her when she hadn't been able to walk anymore. He probably would have carried her to the point of exhaustion and beyond, given the chance.

"You awake now?" She had, in fact, dozed off again, but opened her eyes when Steve came back into the room. He looked perfectly fine now, damn him, and not like he'd nearly frozen to death. He probably could have gone out and run a marathon and still had enough energy to chop down a dozen trees, and she couldn't even make it out of bed.

"Sort of," Martha muttered. She felt like she could fall asleep at any moment; she was warm and comfortable and _tired_ , exhausted like she hadn't felt in months, even throughout her journey.

He sat down on the bed next to her. "Clint has something he needs to tell us, but he said he was going to wait till you were ready. Something about the guy who's been following us; I guess he has an idea of who it might be?"

"Awfully tenacious for one of the Master's goons. Maybe he's frozen to death somewhere out on the prairie, though." She still didn't even know if it _was_ someone working for the Master, but she didn't know why anyone else would be following them, either.

"Maybe." Steve sounded doubtful. "Listen, uh. When I brought you in- I- Laura had me- I just want you to know-"

"...you helped undress me?" Martha felt a blush rise in her cheeks, and she ducked her head slightly lower to hide it underneath the blankets.

"I mean, I didn't see anything, and I sure as hell didn't try to touch you or anything, but I just wanted you to know, that's all. In case you found out later and thought I was pulling something fast on you." His ears were red again, and his blush spread down past the collar of his shirt. 

"No, it needed to be done, I understand completely." And it was true; she would have trusted Steve to do it all by himself if they'd been elsewhere and she'd been unconscious. She felt safe with him, and she knew that even if he saw her entirely naked, he still wouldn't take advantage of it. He was just that kind of a man. 

"Still. It's just something I wouldn't have done if there'd been a choice, you know."

"I do know," she reassured him. "And I'm not going to blame you for anything when you saved my life." Besides, it wasn't like she hadn't seen him nearly naked before, and she felt that turnabout was fair play.

"How'd you get those scars on your back?"

The blood drained from Martha's face at his question. "I was in Australia," she began slowly. She hadn't told anyone about it before; hadn't had anyone she trusted enough to tell. "There were some kids in the street, and the Toclafane came down and wanted to play with them." The Toclafane had the same mentality as small children, but their playing was far more deadly. "They'd killed three of them, and they had the fourth backed up against a wall, just a few feet away from me. As they were closing in, I threw myself in front of her and put my perception filter 'round both our necks. As far as they were concerned, their prey just disappeared, and they didn't know why. But their blades still caught me - sliced through my pack and everything in it. I had to stand there for about fifteen minutes, bleeding, with a terrified little girl in between me and the wall, hoping something wouldn't go wrong and we wouldn't get caught."

Steve's eyes widened as she told her story, and he reached into the blanket cocoon to squeeze her hand. "But you didn't."

"No. She went back to her parents, and I found a truck leaving Sydney and collapsed in the back of it. I couldn't take care of my wounds myself, because I couldn't reach them. I'm not sure how long I was in the bed of the truck; it made rounds to the sheep stations in the Outback, and with the perception filter on, nobody could see me. I was in the back, totally unnoticed. I slipped in and out of consciousness for days, and my wounds got infected. I finally managed to get off the truck when it was stopped, and a sheep farmer and his wife let me stay with them until I could at least stand up without passing out." 

What she failed to mention was that she still hadn't been entirely healed when she left, and the rest of her trip through Australia had been similarly hazy when she'd relapsed from time to time. It wasn't exactly one of her success stories. "A tube of Neosporin is practically worth its weight in gold, you know. I didn't have anything to treat my wounds with, even if I'd been able to reach them. They needed to be stitched, and instead they were just...exposed."

The biggest saving grace was that it had been winter at the time. Water had been nearly impossible to come by; she'd rationed her sips carefully, and been driven to drink water she probably wouldn't have thought about consuming under different circumstances. But the weather had been cooler, even cold at night, and it had helped to ease her fever.

"How did you survive?"

Martha shrugged. "Luck, mostly. Same as the rest of the time." She didn't have a better answer, because she knew that she probably shouldn't have survived. Her body had burnt most of its fat reserves during the fever - and it hadn't had many to begin with. She should have bled out, should have died a slow and lingering death from blood poisoning, should have ended up as bleached bones gnawed on by dingos.

"Might've been sheer stubbornness, too," she added with a slight smile. 

"Now that, I can believe." Steve shook his head. "I ought to tell Clint-"

"Tell Clint what?" The man had an uncanny sense of timing, although Martha wouldn't have been surprised if he'd been eavesdropping as well. She looked at their host, studying his worn face and his missing arm. He'd obviously just come in from the outdoors; he still had his coat on, and a quiver was slung over his shoulder, though the bow was nowhere in sight.

"You're an archer?" she blurted out before she caught herself, covering her mouth with a hand in embarrassment.

"Wasn't gonna let something like losing my arm keep me from shooting a bow." He took a seat in the rocking chair next to a tall wooden wardrobe, plain, but stained a warm honey colour to match the chair. "I worked on this myself - some guys who lose arms use their teeth to draw the string, but it's hard as hell to hit a moving target that way. With this-" he tapped his prosthesis with his good hand- "I can keep the bow steady and nock and draw with my good arm. Took some practice, but I'm almost back to my usual standard. I can keep Laura and the kids fed with this, at least."

"You don't see many people shooting bows these days," Steve remarked. "Most of Fury's agents use guns."

"Don't see many guys throwing shields around these days, either." Clint grinned at him. "And a bow's more subtle than that. More versatile than a gun with the heads I make, too. No one's shot a Toclafane with a gun and lived to tell about it, but I took them out with my arrows, like I said."

"With arrows?" Martha hadn't been conscious for that part of the conversation, and the news surprised her. "How? Did you puncture the casing or-"

"EMP - electromagnetic pulse. It fried the suckers when I hit them. Must've had the frequency just right."

"Did you open them?" She struggled to sit up for a moment, and Steve untucked a few blankets to help her. One of the biggest mysteries surrounding the Toclafane was what they _were_. The spheres were just a shell, and nobody knew what was inside. The name itself was from a Gallifreyan fairy tale, according to the Doctor, and wasn't what the species was called - couldn't be. If they even _were_ living things. Martha imagined them as being something like the Daleks, but in a smaller package.

"Hell no. I buried those suckers. And if you want me to dig them up, it's not happening till spring. They're as far underground as Laura and I could dig, and wrapped in chains, to boot. I wasn't taking any chances."

"It was worth a shot." Martha sighed. Maybe if she could figure out what the Toclafane were, she could subvert them, try to get them on her side instead of the Master's. They seemed to have little interest outside of gleefully killing people, but she thought that maybe they could be reasoned with. Of course, that would have involved taking off her perception filter, and she wasn't sure she was willing to try that.

"So Steve's been telling me about the guy who's been following you." Clint leaned back in his chair. "You got a trained assassin here, but one who isn't killing you. Most assassins are either working for the government, or, more likely, they're mercenaries. Column A means they're probably just trying to survive like anyone else, might be working with the resistance if they've got a particular sort of loyalty. I'm not saying it's impossible that they could've thrown their lot in with the new regime, but I know a good chunk of them by reputation, and it's unlikely. They're probably keeping their heads down and waiting this out. Column B, there's no money to buy 'em with anymore, and they're tricky sons of bitches anyway. You can't trust them any farther than you can throw them, and the Master seems like a real control freak type. If they've got orders to bring you in alive, they might just change their mind and go for the kill anyway."

"He'd kill them if they disobeyed." There was no doubt in Martha's mind about that.

"You've got yourself a hell of a puzzle here, that's for sure. Any sane person from either group would've told him to go to hell about now; assassins are patient when they wait for a kill, but there's a difference between patience and following two people across the country in the middle of winter. There are people who'd do it if the payoff was big enough, but- like I said, that ain't happening. Anyone like that has their currency in hard form and is holed up with whatever luxuries they managed to buy before everything went all to hell."

"Maybe it's just some fanatic. He's got those; they followed me across Europe and Asia." For some reason, there were people who liked the opportunities the Master gave them, to create chaos and treat their fellow human beings like animals. There were always people like that, throughout history.

"Not good enough. This requires training - what's more, beating someone like Steve up requires, well." Clint chewed on his lower lip for a moment. "There's a guy, more like a myth in the intelligence community. Everyone's heard of him, but almost nobody's actually seen him. Rumour's placed him at almost every tipping point in the last sixty years, giving things the push they need to slide into anarchy. He's a master assassin, and he always, _always_ makes his kill. I've never seen him myself, but that doesn't mean I don't believe in him. And I think he's the only guy left who's skilled enough to pull this off. He coulda killed you anytime since you set foot on American soil. Probably could've captured you, too."

"So what column is he in?" Steve asked.

"Neither. He's been linked to the KGB - Soviet intelligence - but they're defunct. And having the same guy operate for more than sixty years? That's why he's considered a myth. He'd have to be almost ninety by now."

Martha glanced at Steve. He was ninety, and clearly still quite capable of putting up a fight - but he'd been preserved on ice the whole time. Their eyes met, and she could tell he was thinking the same thing.

"The only thing that's certain about him is his code name. They call him the Winter Soldier."

 

_Interlude_

The cold cuts through him like knives. He hasn't bothered to start a fire in the small house yet, doesn't know if he will. It's harder to make himself go through the basics of survival, harder to remember what he needs to do. Finding weapons, that he does instinctively. This house has a number of guns in a safe, all well-oiled, barely used, and a stock of ammunition that could last for years. He's found a number of caches like this on his trip through America, and it never fails to surprise him. So much wealth and abundance, and they spend it all on weapons, they get paranoid and stockpile food and supplies for a revolution that will never come. He's stepped over their decaying corpses time and time again. Nobody prepared for the Master, and their guns were useless against him.

He eats food mechanically, without bothering to heat it up. He knows how to use the heat pouches, he just doesn't care. It's half-frozen, the ice scraping against his spoon as he shovels it into his mouth. Eating he can do; his body tells him that food is necessary. Cold he's learned to ignore. It never goes away anyway.

(All the Soldier knows is cold. One of his earliest memories is of pain, of ice and snow, freezing water rushing over him. He likes to imagine floating in the water sometimes; it had been peaceful there, and the cold had overcome the pain eventually. It was an image he kept returning to during his training, the one thing he kept from his handlers when they had wrung everything else out of him.)

He steals cars without worrying about reprisal; the key around his neck keeps the Toclafane from noticing him. Whenever he runs out of gas, he leaves them by the side of the road. He could have outdistanced his target by now - he has, actually, but he knows that. He's waiting for them to catch up.

He doesn't like being ordered to keep them alive. That's not part of his programming; he kills, swiftly and silently, and returns. The prolonged chase confuses him. He'd had a bead on his target in San Francisco, could have taken her out with a headshot. He could have killed her so many times by now, but he hasn't. And the longer he's in America, the more he hesitates. Memories drift across his mind like snowflakes; when he tries to catch them, they melt away in an instant. But almost remembering makes him want to stay longer, makes his programming start to break down so he _can_ disobey, can wait to capture her. It's not because he wants to spare her, it's because he can feel something other than the drive to follow orders for the first time in years.

There's someone else there, buried beneath the Winter Soldier. He can't remember who he used to be, but he knows he's there. Maybe if he waits long enough, he'll find out.

(Maybe if he waits long enough, he'll be able to kill him, the Soldier thinks. He doesn't want this, never asked for it. Life is simple when it's narrowed down to eliminating one target after another. The guilt and uncertainty seeping up soil it, like footprints on new-fallen snow. He wants his mind to be blank and pure, like ice. That's what _they_ want, and if he gives them what they want, then the pain ends.)

He's moving east, always east. Like a lodestone, he's drawn back somewhere, but _where_? Where is he going? Where are they going? 

(It all goes back to the beginning. The Soldier knows this, rages against it. If he could feel fear, he would be afraid. But the Soldier doesn't feel anything; his programming ensures that.)

There are times when he wakes up and his face is wet with tears, but he doesn't know why. His gut twists with guilt, and he has to run outside to retch into the snow, throwing up everything in his stomach. But he can't remember why he feels this way, what makes him feel like this. It's important, but trying to remember _hurts_ , like shards of glass piercing his brain. 

It's easier to forget. It's always been easier to forget.


	4. four

_New York, February 2009_

"I was born here." Steve stared up at the skyline. It was unrecognisable now, skyscrapers rising higher and higher in monuments of reflective glass and stainless steel. He wondered what Brooklyn would be like, if he went there. Somehow, he didn't think the tenements he'd grown up in would still be standing. 

"I know." Martha put a hand on his arm. "You should see London." The pain in her voice told him she knew what it was like to gaze upon the ghost of a city you'd once known and loved. Except it wasn't the same; he had more than sixty years separating the vision of New York in his mind from the present. It wasn't just what the Master had wrought, but the passage of time itself, the progress the world had made while he'd slept under the ice. 

The cars they saw abandoned were totally foreign to him (apparently Howard Stark's flying cars had never come to pass), the sleek lines and multitude of colours unimaginable to someone who'd grown up with Henry Ford's Model Ts (you could get any colour you wanted, as long as it was black). The abandoned cities had sprawled out over the years, neat identical houses lined up in rows miles away from the rest of the city. Steve was used to living in the heart of the city, the hustle and bustle of everything that was New York. Growing up in a little house with a yard and a white picket fence might've become the American dream, but it had never really been his.

And the technology? The power grid no longer existed, but Martha had told him about all the modern conveniences. Microwaves, smaller iceboxes and freezers (even ones that would make ice for you!), battery-powered everything. DVDs and CDs and MP3s and an array of letters and numbers that made his head spin. And that wasn't even touching computers and telephones, both of which could fit in your pocket now.

That was a world that no longer existed, one Steve could never belong to. This one, he understood. War made everything simpler, and the Master had reduced everything to the bare bones. All that remained was life and death; you lived or you died. It was the simplest equation there was.

He turned his head to look at Martha, putting his hand over hers for a moment. Everything was covered in snow; under different circumstances, it might have been picturesque, almost romantic. But they were here to get a job done and get out, and that was what mattered in the end. "Where's the...whatever it is you're looking for?" Martha still hadn't divulged the secret of the weapon, and he hadn't asked her to. They still had time.

"UNIT's North America headquarters, downtown Manhattan." 

They were at the far north end of the city - as far from where they needed to be as they could, while still being in New York. They'd crept in amongst the rows of housing converted into camps, past the line that delineated the edge of the camps and into no man's land. Windows everywhere had been smashed in, and everything that could have been salvaged was.

Walking through the streets of the deserted city made Steve's heart ache. This was his home, and while most of the buildings still stood, the destruction of its people was everywhere he looked. Bodies in various states of decay laid everywhere, their clothing stripped, sun-bleached, torn, any revealed flesh stripped away by scavengers. It was slaughter on a scale he had never seen before, and his knuckles were white as he gripped the handle of his shield.

A glance at Martha's face showed she was impassive, but the lines of her jaw were tense, and she looked straight ahead, avoiding glancing at the ground. Steve didn't blame her, but he didn't have that luxury; he was the lookout, and he had to make sure nobody was hiding in the shadows, waiting to take them out. 

Though, judging by what Clint had said, they'd never see the Winter Soldier coming anyway. He certainly hadn't the first time, and here in the city? There were too many hiding places. He could have been in any building, watching and waiting. If he wanted to kill them, it would be laughably easy if he had even half the skill Clint claimed. Steve didn't think even he would be able to survive a headshot, and he wasn't exactly eager to find out.

"Here." Martha tugged his sleeve, directing him to a building that looked just like every other around it. Nothing said what it was, or that it housed an organisation devoted to combating alien threats against humanity. (Steve still had a hard time believing all this alien stuff; as far as he was concerned, aliens were just folks from different countries, not other planets.)

"Right." He tried to ease the door open, but it didn't budge. A yank proved just as difficult, as did wrapping his fist and trying to punch through the glass. "I'm going to need you to stand over there." Steve gestured to the side, in front of one of the other buildings. "Maybe in the alley - actually, no, go across the street. Just in case."

Martha gave him a puzzled look, but she went across the street, disappearing into one of the alleys. Steve backed up - about halfway across the street, he gauged - and took a deep breath, flinging his shield like a discus. It shattered the glass of one door, breaking the deathly silence of the city with a crash.

"That's one way to make an entrance." Martha came up behind him.

"I'm glad that worked," he admitted. "Woulda been real embarrassing to have that bounce back in my face." 

"I'm pretty sure bisecting your skull would have been the bigger problem at hand." She offered him a wry grin. "Or chopping your hand off, if you'd tried to catch it."

"Do you always ruin moments with dire medical predictions, or am I just that lucky?" Steve stepped inside, offering her a hand through the glass of the door. Surprisingly, she took it, her boots crunching on the shards of glass.

"Just lucky." She raised an eyebrow at Steve's shield, which was embedded several inches deep in the wall behind what was presumably the receptionist's desk. "And also right."

He grunted as he tugged on the shield. This wasn't the deepest he'd ever got it stuck in something, but it was pretty close, and he was privately a little impressed by his show of strength. It was always bewildering when he pulled off a stunt like that, the likes of which he never could have dreamed of before the serum. "Reinforced steel plates behind this." He ran a hand over the dent his shield had made in the steel. "Someone tried to make this building seriously defensible."

"Wouldn't work very well against Daleks," Martha muttered under her breath. "Wasn't too great when it came to the Toclafane, either. I reckon they had a security system that got hacked in about ten seconds flat. All that fancy architecture, and they forgot that aliens nearly always walk right in through the front door. Sometimes they even ask you to let them in first."

"Like Hitler." Steve had been just old enough to understand the process that had led up to the war; Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia, the British government's attempt to appease him by giving him more land. He had come of age in a world where war seemed an inevitability, even with America's isolationism. 

"Isn't it just? Except the Master used literal mind control to make everyone vote for him. Buried it in the mobile phones, a tiny subliminal message working away at our brains. The sort of thing Hitler could have only dreamt of."

Steve didn't want to think about what Hitler would have done with something like that. Probably persuaded Britain to give up without a fight, and then the rest of them would have been done for. He shook his head to banish the thoughts, examining his surroundings instead. The potted plants in the corners of the lobby had long since died and rotted away, leaving empty planters. The floor was a polished dark stone, the desk made from wood and more stone. Behind the desk on either side, the lobby stretched back, leading to elevators. "You reckon they've got stairs somewhere?"

"Have to, for fire safety. Probably towards the back." She gave him a rueful smile. "I haven't got any idea where it is in the building, I'm afraid. We can split up, if you'd like. You search up, I'll search down."

Oh, yeah, that sounded like it would work real well, letting Martha wander off by herself into the depths of a building they hadn't even checked first. Normally she would have been more safety-conscious than that, and Steve wondered why she'd made the suggestion. They almost never split up unless it was absolutely necessary.

"Why down?"

"Easier to protect something underground," she explained. "There's only so much you can do building up when you have to worry about supporting the weight of your security measures. Underground, you can pour concrete, surround it with steel, do whatever you like. You can make defences so solid that you could drop a bomb on the rest of the building and it would still be safe."

The fire stairs were behind one of the elevators, in a small, unobtrusive niche. Steve played the beam of his flashlight down the stairwell, but didn't see anything. Not that he expected to; anyone who was down there would've known enough to hide from them.

"No rats," he observed.

"I don't think anything's been able to get in here. Honestly, I'm not sure _we'll_ be able to get into the most protected parts of the building."

"But you have so far."

"So far," she agreed. "Doesn't mean I expect things to keep being easy. They might have a failsafe that tripped when the power went out; otherwise you could cut the power to the building and use that to get in." Martha shook her head in disbelief. "You know, I never used to think like this, and now I'm talking like I'm in some sort of spy film or planning to steal the crown jewels or something. Not that they're still there; I think the Master took them and gave them to his wife." 

"If I need to plan a heist in the future, now I know who to call," Steve teased her. He went down the stairs first, holding his shield in one hand, flashlight in the other.

"Oh, yeah, we could be a real Bonnie and Clyde."

"They did banks," he remarked idly. "Stick-ups. Not the kind of thefts you're thinking about." He remembered watching the chases on the newsreels whenever he and Bucky could scrape together enough pennies to get into the show.

"Now who's the one ruining everything?" She eased open the first door they came to, standing behind it while Steve prepared for an assault. 

"Nothing in here. Looks like utilities or something." The room was filled with blocky transformers that cast strange shadows as he shone the light over them. "Nothing that screams secret storage room."

"I don't exactly expect it to be labelled." Martha peered around the edge of the door. "But I don't expect it to be in the very first room, either. Best to keep going down."

"There's a door on the other side of the room." Steve pointed his flashlight at the glass; he'd caught the glint from it. "We should check where it leads to." Because if it wasn't in the first room they came to, then he didn't think it was likely to be down the first staircase, either. "They couldn't give you a tracker or something?"

"Steve, I barely found out where these places _were_. Most of UNIT were slaughtered in the first wave of attacks, and the average worker doesn't know about what I'm looking for. This is seriously high-level stuff, and only a handful of people worldwide knew of its existence in the first place. I was lucky and found a woman in London just in the nick of time." Her tone of voice implied that the woman hadn't survived much longer after Martha met her, and it was enough to make Steve stop pushing the issue.

"You said there's one in Rio?" The spaces between the transformers were full of cobwebs and dust. Even if nothing larger had been able to get into the building, the spiders had been busy. Steve pushed through with his shield, keeping the spiderwebs out of his face.

"Mmhm." Martha tried the door, but it was locked. Taking a few steps back, Steve rushed the door with his shield, and it clattered open onto another stairwell. "Wish I'd had you around for the other buildings. I had a hell of a time trying to pick the locks."

"You could have picked that lock?" He glanced over his shoulder at her.

"I said _tried_. Didn't say I succeeded. Though it's interesting; usually, if you look around enough, you can find a key for most doors _somewhere_ in the building. It just involves loads of hunting and backtracking and patience. Your way is a lot faster." 

They went down another twisting staircase; this one didn't have any doors as they descended. Martha wondered if she was leading them into a trap - and for no real reason. Truth be told, she'd never been to the other UNIT buildings; she'd got the locations from a member of UNIT working with the resistance by claiming the Doctor had said there was a weapon. Nobody had been with her before, and she had all the pieces she needed already. She had pocketed one of the vials that morning, taking all but one out of the case so she would be able to dramatically put the one she "found" in and leave gaps for the others.

"You know, they always shoot locks in films," she suggested. "You could try that."

"Don't have enough spare clips to waste bullets." They both stared at the door. Martha would have killed for the sonic screwdriver just about now. 

"Guess it's time for brute force again, then?" Martha felt a little bad about making Steve break doors down when it was unnecessary, but she had to maintain the facade that she was putting together a weapon to kill the Master. There was no chance anyone would believe her if they knew what she was really doing, let alone help her, and she wasn't sure she would have made it through America without Steve.

Steve thought for a second, then lifted his shield up, bringing it down on the door handle with a shearing blow. The pieces of the handle fell to the floor, and the door swung open.

"Easier than shooting it," he offered with a smile.

Okay, that was a pretty impressive trick, Martha had to give him that much.

Behind the door laid rows and rows of shelving; probably some sort of storage facility for alien artefacts. "Don't touch anything," she murmured to Steve. "We don't have any way of knowing what they might do. There's a bloody good reason why everything's buried well underground." This was most likely where they kept the artefacts that were too dangerous to have anywhere else. Personally, Martha would have relocated them to somewhere in the middle of the country without any other living creatures for miles around, not deep in the heart of Manhattan. 

"That's real comforting." Steve kept his voice low, too. "Tell you what, I'll just stay right here and make sure nothing happens while you look for whatever it is."

Perfect. To be honest, the space between the shelves _was_ too narrow for someone like Steve, who would have had to slip through it sideways. Martha, of course, had no problem, and she went about her business pretending to look through the items on the shelves.

"Probably half of these are down here because they don't know what they do and can't get them to do anything," she offered as idle conversation. "Just assume that everything is as dangerous as possible until you discover otherwise. And there's probably even more artefacts that require special containment; this is kind of like that spare room you throw all your junk into? Except it's the sort of junk that might kill you if you touch it."

"How do they even get it?"

Martha shrugged. "Dunno. Alien boot sales, maybe."

"...boot sales?" Steve sounded confused.

"Er. Trunks? In cars? Or in UFOs, I suppose - flying saucers." Oh, bollocks. Sometimes talking to Steve was a bit like speaking a second language. "Alien spaceships. I've never seen any that were saucer-shaped, anyway."

"You realise you aren't making a lick of sense, right?"

"I thought you'd be used to that by now." Between cultural differences, temporal differences, and what Martha generally termed 'weird bollocks', quite a lot of what she said managed to confuse Steve in one way or another. "I bet the Doctor would be able to look at all of this and know what it does," she sighed. It wasn't relevant, but Martha was fascinated by all the alien gadgets arrayed on the shelves, and she wanted to know what they did.

"You seem to set a lot of store in what the Doctor thinks," Steve ventured carefully, and she could practically hear the unspoken question in his tone. He'd certainly heard enough stories about the Doctor by now to have worked it out.

"I fancied him." Martha didn't look around the shelving to watch Steve's reaction, although she wanted to. "Didn't just fancy him; I loved him. It started out as a schoolgirl crush, but after watching him, I thought, this is what I want to be like. This is a man I respect and love. I'd had a few boyfriends at uni, but nothing serious, and the Doctor- I never expected to fall in love with him. I mean, he looks human, but he's a nine hundred year old alien. He's seen and done so much, and when you look in his eyes, there's just this unfathomable _sadness_. He's the last of his kind, apart from the Master. Sometimes he's the oldest and wisest person I've ever met, and sometimes he's just a lonely little boy, and I just want to hold him." She laughed ruefully. It had all been so daft; she should have known better all along.

"There was this girl who travelled with him before me, Rose. He fell in love with her first, and he lost her. And he would just- keep comparing me to her. Rose would've done this, Rose would've done that, Rose would have known what to do. It was _awful_." Martha wiped away a tear. "And it's nothing against Rose; god knows I have loads of respect for anyone willing to put up with the Doctor. But I wanted him to look at me and see _me_ , just once. Appreciate who I was and what I could do, instead of wanting someone else."

"Yeah, I know how that is."

"When he was human, he fell in love with another woman, Joan. And I wished he could have fallen in love with me - it was stupid, really; his disguise worked too well, made him too human. He never would have developed feelings like that for his servant. But I just _wanted_ it, even though he wasn't even the proper Doctor then. I would have taken even an echo of him. And I realised then that it would never happen, that I was wasting my time." More tears fell, splatting in the dust, and Martha didn't try to hide the fact that she sounded choked up. Why bother, when Steve could probably guess that she was crying? "Besides, I had a life of my own to get back to; maybe Rose could've just left everything behind for him, but I'd spent years working towards my degree, and I had a family, and- I can't stay with him when all this is over, Steve. I have to get back to normal."

"If there's any normal left to get back to." He sounded dubious, and Martha didn't blame him for that. 

"There will be. I haven't spent all this time travelling for nothing." She sniffed and straightened up. "It's hell, though, trying to talk yourself out of loving a person when you have to tell everyone around you how wonderful he is. And he _is_ wonderful and brilliant, but he's just...not for me. I've come to terms with that. I deserve someone who treats me like an equal, who doesn't see me as just a passenger. Someone who appreciates me for who I am instead of looking at me and seeing someone else's ghost. 

"God, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go on so much." Martha laughed sadly. "Look at me, rambling at you like you're some sort of agony aunt."

"I-"

"Here." She pulled the vial out of her pocket, then popped her head and arm around the corner of the shelves. "That's what we came for."

"That's it?" 

"Part of it. Still two more to go, so we're halfway done." Or she was halfway done, anyway. Steve just had to help her get out of the country, and then he would be free to go back to doing...well, whatever it was he did. "Think we ought to set up camp in here for tonight?"

"In the foyer?" Steve shrugged. "Or maybe one of the first couple of floors? It'll save us the trouble of trying to find another building."

Martha nodded. "And then we can visit the camps tomorrow." She wanted to spend a few days there, if they could spare the time; they were coming to the line of factories down the Eastern Seaboard, and that would slow them considerably as she went from camp to camp. She had three months left to return to England. Maybe, she thought, if she caught a boat in Florida and sailed to South America, rather than travelling through central America and down the spine of the Andes, it would cut out a chunk of time. She would have to rely on word of mouth to spread her stories, but it seemed as though that wouldn't be a problem; nearly everyone had heard of her before she came to them these days. 

They pitched camp, such as it was, in an office on the second floor. The carpet offered thin comfort, but it was more than they'd had for awhile; they'd had poor luck with safe houses lately, finding most of them abandoned and clearly raided by the Toclafane. Martha wasn't willing to take a chance on staying in any of them, not when the Master's people knew where they were. They'd hunkered down in the odd house here or there, but not lately. Something had made Martha increasingly paranoid, although she didn't know why. Maybe it was because the Winter Soldier hadn't made any obvious attempts on them for months, and the Master didn't seem to have anyone else trying to find her. It didn't seem right.

Steve had spent a little bit of time poking around the office, peering at the cubicles, each wall still decorated with the pictures and calendars of their former inhabitants, pieces of lives that had abruptly stopped. He ran his hands over the computers and keyboards, picking up a mouse to peer at it, inspecting all the paraphernalia of modern office life. It was all normal to Martha, but utterly alien to him.

"I can't imagine ever working in a place like this." He shook his head. "Where I grew up, most guys worked in a factory, you know? Or else construction jobs, or...whatever they could find. A lot of 'em just stood in bread lines after the crash. I didn't even know what I was gonna do; only thing I was ever good at was art, and I didn't know if I was good enough to make ends meet, you know?" 

Martha looked a little embarrassed; her own childhood had been entirely different to Steve's. She'd never really imagined working an office job, but that was because she'd had her heart set on being a doctor from a young age. In her neighbourhood, the adults worked in offices, but typically not in open bullpens like this; they were paid well enough to rate individual offices, like her mum. Or they were doctors, or professors, or any number of other professions. Money had never been a problem. She'd seen Hooverville in Central Park at the height of the Depression, and she could imagine what it had been like going through that as a child. But living it herself? She'd never come close to it.

"It seems soulless," she remarked. "A little sad."

"That's exactly what it is." He scuffed at the carpet with the toe of a boot. "They put you in a place like this and suck out all your individuality - but it's no worse than the factories, is it? Same thing on an assembly line. Or in the Army. Nobody wants people, they just want warm bodies."

"But you joined the Army. Were desperate to, in fact."

"There was a war on." Steve shrugged and sat down on the floor to eat his dinner. "Like I said, I wanted to protect people. And if you don't mind following orders, the Army isn't so bad. Hell, it would've seemed great when I was a kid. Three squares a day and a warm bed at night. Not much more a guy can ask for."

It was more than they had right now, too. "But you didn't like the orders." She didn't blame him; she probably would have felt much the same way.

"Turns out I wasn't so good at that part," he agreed. "They wanted a trained monkey, and they got- something else."

"Captain America."

Steve shook his head. "That was all invented for the PR. Selling defence bonds, boosting morale, leading scrap drives. What they wanted was Captain America, and what they got was Steve Rogers. And the rest of the Howling Commandos, too. But we did our job, even if it wasn't the way they wanted it done. We took down HYDRA and made the world safe for mankind. For awhile, anyway."

"What do you want to do when all this is done?" Martha asked. "Go back to the Army?"

Steve looked taken aback, and in his face, she saw the realisation that he didn't expect to survive this. He was going to give his life up for this, sacrifice himself a second time - permanently. What better way to go out than to make yourself a martyr again? 

"No." He looked away from her. "Hadn't really thought about it much, truth be told. Maybe I'll collect my back pay from the Army and go buy a mansion in California or something."

"That sounds boring." She couldn't picture Steve just settling down to live a normal life. Maybe he _wanted_ to, but she could tell he'd been changed by everything he'd seen and done.

"Warm, though. After spending sixty years on ice, I never want to be cold again." Which was ironic, the current conditions considered.

"Going to live by yourself in that mansion?" Martha tilted her head slightly, a coy smile playing on her face. She had kept flirting with him off and on, and occasionally he almost responded, only to immediately shut it down. She didn't blame him; this wasn't the sort of situation where flirting was terribly appropriate, but at least it took her mind off of everything for a few moments.

"Well, since everyone I knew is dead..." He shrugged. "Probably. I always had trouble picking up girls - nobody was ever interested in a short, skinny kid who couldn't even make it through a dance without an asthma attack. Only way I ever got dates was when Bucky tricked his girls' friends into goin' out with me, and they hardly ever said two words to me. And then, after the serum...all they ever wanted was to be with Captain America. That kind of thing never interested me. Besides, there was a war on. Not much of a chance for going on dates - not many ladies around, either. Same kinda thing right now; hard to meet girls when there's not much of a selection."

"Oi!" Martha protested indignantly. She felt that she constituted a very fine selection, thank you very much. "Watch what you're saying there!" She elbowed him in the side. 

"You don't count, you're...you." Steve made some sort of vague gesture with his hands that Martha couldn't quite interpret, but she felt rather insulted by it anyway. They had, after all, been sleeping huddled together for warmth for months now, and she had politely ignored every single one of the erections she'd felt pressed against her. (Maybe that was the problem; maybe he'd wanted her to do something about it and she'd missed some sort of completely imaginary cue.) 

"What do you mean, I'm me?" Martha thought about kicking him in the shins, but to be honest, he probably wouldn't even notice it.

"In love with another fella, for starters. Or on the rebound. And I'm not that kinda guy, to take advantage of a situation like that." He ducked his head sheepishly, as if he hadn't meant for that last bit to slip out. "And I don't think you're that kind of girl, to want something else so soon. Not that I know anything about girls," he added in a rush. "I mean, I'm really not good at that kind of thing. Girls were always Bucky's department; he could charm 'em out of their stockings in five minutes flat. I could hardly even talk to them. Still can't, really."

"I hate to break it to you, Steve, but I'm definitely a girl, and you've been talking to me for the last five months." Martha folded her arms over her chest. Sure, things had been awkward between them at the start, but they'd been conversing more or less nightly for months now; it wasn't like there was much else to do, or many other options for human contact, outside of the camps. If they hadn't talked to each other, they would have gone mad.

"That's just talking talking. I mean like..." Another ridiculously vague hand wave. "Mushy stuff."

"Romance." She gave him a flat look. "You know, it's possible to fall in love with someone without once discussing feelings with them, or going on a real date, or-"

"Yeah. I've done that." Steve fell silent for a moment, slipping a small, tarnished compass out of his jacket pocket and flipping it open. "There was this girl during the war. Peggy. She was English, just like you. Posh accent, absolutely gorgeous, deadly with a pistol. I wanted to impress her from the moment I saw her at Camp Lehigh - she was part of the SSR, involved in the selection process for the serum. She was there when it happened, and when Erskine got shot afterwards. She ran after the HYDRA agent and tried to capture him. Most goddamn impressive thing I've seen." 

"She didn't die, did she?" God, that would have been an awful way to end the story - although she didn't think there was a good ending to it regardless.

"Nah. I caught the guy and he chomped down on a cyanide capsule. Just like every other HYDRA agent who got caught. Peggy and I ended up over in Europe together - I was on a USO tour, and she was with the SSR. She helped me when Bucky's regiment got captured, and after that she was our liaison with the SSR. She followed us through Europe while we stormed HYDRA factories."

"And you fell in love."

"She kissed me right before I got on the Valkyrie." Steve looked down at the picture. "I was talking to her on the radio when I took it down, told her I needed to take a rain cheque on the dance I promised her. Guess I ended up a little late for that."

"Oh, Steve." Martha wrapped her arms around him under the crinkly blanket, rested her head on his shoulder. 

"All I can really do is hope she had a good life, I guess. Hope she didn't spend too much time waiting around for me." Steve pressed his lips together. "She was one of a kind. I'm sure she made some guy a lucky fella - I just wish that guy could've been me." He shook his head. "Sorry for the sob story."

"You don't have to apologise." She rolled her eyes. "You listened to mine earlier, after all." And she'd actually been crying during hers, which made it infinitely more pathetic. "And mine's not exactly tragic, it's just...daft." Not like his at all. Hers was just the story of a stupid mistake she'd made. Steve had been in love and given up his chance at happiness to save the world. It made her feel a little silly and immature, like everything she'd felt for the Doctor had been nothing more than a trivial schoolgirl crush.

"Not many girls would walk around the world to save a guy they loved," he said gently, "let alone a guy who'd already broken their heart."

"It's not for him-"

"I know. Not many people would walk around the world at all. Don't sell yourself short, Martha. You're a hell of a lot stronger than you claim to be, else you wouldn't have made it this far. You're not second best to anyone, and any guy who thinks otherwise isn't worth your time."

"And you said you couldn't talk to girls." She tipped her chin up slightly. It would have been so easy to kiss him, and she wanted to so badly. But if there was ever a bad time to kiss someone, it was just after they'd told you about their girlfriend sixty years ago that they'd lost while frozen in ice, so she just smiled at him instead. "I think that was pretty good, Steve Rogers. Very smooth."

"It was just the truth," he protested, and Martha could feel the skin of his neck warming under her cheek as he blushed.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you that women love to be flattered with the truth?"

"Bucky said to lie and tell them what they wanted to hear." He shrugged, and her head bobbed slightly with the motion.

"Bucky was hooking you up with the wrong kind of girls. That's why you never got anywhere. You just needed to find a girl more like you. Someone brave, with a kind heart. Someone willing to do anything for the people she cared about. Someone who understands that it's not what a bloke looks like, but who they are inside." She had a sudden feeling that it sounded an awful lot like she was talking about herself, which wasn't what she was trying to do at all. She was trying to tell Steve that there could still be someone out there for him, that there might be someone worth living for. Instead, she turned it into a joke. "Someone who won't be talked out of their stockings in five minutes flat."

"You aren't even wearing stockings," he pointed out, and it was Martha's turn to blush.

"I could be. You haven't-" Oh. Wait. He had seen her legs. God, she'd known that was going to come back to haunt her. "Honestly, I'd rather have a set of thermal underwear than all the stockings in the world."

"Same here," he agreed with a chuckle. "Besides, girls didn't have stockings anymore by the time we shipped out. All of them went to scrap drives, to make parachutes. Instead they'd paint 'em on with makeup, if they were really desperate. Bucky had a few mishaps with getting it on his legs-" Steve cut himself off, apparently deciding the subject matter wasn't appropriate for a lady's delicate ears, while Martha refrained from scandalising Steve by asking him if Bucky had got any on his face. The conversation died out soon after that, and the two of them fell asleep in easy, companionable silence.


	5. five

_Washington, D.C., March 2009_

"Five months," Fury said. "She crosses three continents and a goddamn ocean by herself in five months, and it takes you another five to get across one country." He didn't sound very impressed.

"In the middle of winter," Steve retorted. "While you've been nice and cosy here in your bunker. Sir," he added as an afterthought. 

"Really, it only took four to get _across_. We've been headed south for the last month." Martha tried giving him a friendly smile. As intimidating as Fury was - or as he tried to be - he wasn't the scariest thing she'd seen, not by a long shot. "Maybe more like four and a half. Ish." She could have told him down to the day - she had a small calendar she carried with her, because keeping track of the date was vitally important - but didn't see much why it mattered to him.

"Miss Jones, with all due respect, when I told Captain Rogers to escort you to your objective, I meant for him to do it with all haste, not to take nearly half a year to do it. I have other things for him to do besides holding your hand while you take a nice little road trip."

"Have you _tried_ travelling?" she retorted, abandoning any pretence of being mild-mannered. "We had to walk most of the way, through rain and blizzards and ice and whatever else your bloody weather could throw at us."

"Yeah, actually, I have - when I went most of the way to the North Pole to dig him out of the ice. By hand." He jerked his head at Steve, who looked like he wanted to disappear rather than be in the middle of this fight. "Uphill, both ways, barefoot, in the snow, yada yada."

"You had all the resources you could muster at hand. We had our feet." Martha crossed her arms over her chest. "There's no way you walked through Canada. And this is irrelevant, because right now, the most important mission any of us could possibly have is stopping the Master. Steve isn't officially one of your agents, because whatever power you had vanished the moment the Master took over. He's his own man; maybe he listens to you because he respects you, or because he feels he owes you a debt of gratitude for finding him and waking him up, but if he doesn't want to follow your orders, he doesn't have to."

"Dog sleds," Steve spoke up. "We had dog sleds. And a stealth jet."

"See? Besides, the delay was my fault." She shrugged. "I had to stop at the labour camps. Since you told him to be my bodyguard, he had to come with me. He didn't have a choice in the matter." Hopefully Fury wouldn't ask why she _had_ to stop at the labour camps, because she didn't have a believable lie ready to tell him.

"You can't argue for his free will, then against it." Fury rolled his eyes. "Whatever he chose to do, for whatever reason, he took too damn long. Those are the facts."

Martha wasn't happy about the delay, either; they had two months left to make it to England. Even if Fury helped her travel, nearly two weeks of that would have to be devoted to crossing the Atlantic. Another week in America, hopefully, a month in South America - which was incredibly optimistic - the math said she didn't have much leeway.

"Do you have any cargo ships going from Baltimore to Rio? Because if you can get me on one, I'll be out of your hair as soon as possible, promise." There was the sweet smile again, although she doubted it would work on him.

Fury grunted. "I can get you to Panama on a ship leaving in two days. After that, you're on your own. You can stay down here," he added begrudgingly. "We've got all the comforts of home."

"Baths?" Martha perked up at the prospect. All she wanted at this point was to get really, properly clean; it was an opportunity that came far too rarely.

"Showers. Down the way you came in, first right, all the way at the end of the hall. If you get lost, just ask someone." SHIELD, Martha suspected, had co-opted one of the government's emergency bunkers; it was the only way to explain having room to house a number of people - and, more importantly, all the necessities for prolonged living. It wasn't just a bomb shelter to live in for a few days; it had self-contained hygiene and meal preparation units, and dormitories for a number of people. Compared to most of the places she'd stayed, it was like a five-star hotel.

"You wanna tell me what that was about?" Fury glowered at Steve once Martha had left, the reinforced steel door clanging shut behind her. The single bulb in the room Fury had claimed as his office shone down on his bald head, casting grim-looking shadows on his scarred face.

"What?" Steve seemed genuinely confused. Fury hadn't made arrangements for them to travel to New York, so he'd done the best he could, under the circumstances. Frankly, he thought they'd made pretty damn good time, but he remembered hearing news from the eastern front and how long it had taken Hitler's troops to advance in the teeth of the Russian winter. 

"I told you to steal the damn weapon," Fury growled. "That's the important thing here. There _is_ a weapon, right?"

Steve nodded. "I saw her put the vial she got in New York in the case. It needs two more parts still, from Rio and London." 

"Goddamn UNIT. A weapon's not any good if you keep it scattered in four different parts." He shook his head. "Bunch of idiots, always going on about alien this or that. There are bigger things to worry about here on Earth. She tell you anything about how to get the other two parts?"

"She has directions to the buildings, but nothing more specific. We had to find the last one ourselves." Steve didn't mention how suspicious her behaviour had been then; he was still mulling it over in his head, and he didn't want to leap to any conclusions too soon. "It looks like a gun," he added. "I don't know if there's any particular way to use it, but it can't be too hard."

"Get it from her pack while she's in the shower. We'll keep her here, send you to Rio instead." 

Steve hesitated, but finally nodded in agreement. It was Fury's willingness to keep her safe that was important; he'd been worried that he would take the gun from her and send her off somewhere by herself. Maybe Fury would have a faster mode of transportation, and they could put an end to all this quickly.

Martha had left her pack next to his in the dormitory - and a sudden realisation hit Steve as he knelt to open it. Why hadn't she brought it with her when they'd gone to talk to Fury? She usually guarded it with her life. It was possible that the Master's agents could be anywhere, even here. Especially here. Hell, she should have taken it into the showers with her.

He quickly removed everything, memorising the location and order of each item, until he came to the small black case. He snapped it open, just to make sure he was right - and saw all four vials nestled inside, along with the directions to the UNIT buildings. Martha had been lying about something, but what had she been lying about, and why? Steve frowned and shoved the case in his pocket, swiftly replacing her belongings. 

He'd only just finished when Martha came back into the room, toweling her hair dry, and he quickly picked up his shield, running his hand over the black surface. "Have a good shower?" he asked casually, hoping it didn't sound forced.

"Mm, it was brilliant." She grinned at him, in a better mood now that she was clean. "You ought to shower, maybe think about shaving."

"Yeah, well, it'll just grow out again soon enough." He ran a hand over his beard. "Besides, I'm kinda used to it now."

"You're staying here, aren't you?" She tilted her head, frowning slightly. A crease appeared between her brows.

Great job, Rogers. He'd nearly gone and given the whole thing away not five minutes in. "I thought I'd come with you to Rio. Like you said, I don't have to listen to Fury's orders. And I figured you could use someone to keep an eye on your back down there."

"I'd be glad to have you." Martha smiled at him, and for a moment, it was like a ray of sun shining through a break in the clouds. "Though maybe not till after you take a shower." Her nose crinkled in that way it did when she was teasing with him - or flirting - and Steve suddenly felt intensely awkward again.

And then the screaming began.

In an instant, Steve went from holding the rim of his shield to slipping it onto his arm, moving in front of Martha as he dropped into a crouch. "Stay in here," he told her. "Hide behind one of the beds - don't argue with me, just do it." He pulled the knife from its sheath on his belt and handed it to her.

"Isn't there a saying about not bringing a knife to a gunfight?" She eyed it dubiously.

"Didn't I say no arg-" He was cut off in mid-sentence as Martha grabbed his cheeks in between her hands, kissing him soundly. He thought of Peggy doing the same thing to him, and then he just thought of Martha - smart, beautiful, tough Martha, who was crazy enough to travel around the world unarmed to save her family.

"Yeah. Okay." Steve ran a hand through his hair, blinking for a moment as his mind caught up.

"Definitely shave the beard," she decided, gently pushing him away from her. "It's prickly."

It took him a few more seconds to slip back into combat readiness, and he knew every second counted in a situation like this. Keeping low, he slipped back into the corridor. This place was a maze, which was both good and bad - good, because one person could hold a point almost indefinitely if they had the advantage, and because it was nearly impossible to hit someone at range. Bad, because he didn't know where the hell his quarry was, and searching would waste more time he didn't have.

He had to give the remaining SHIELD agents credit; the few he passed by were armed and prepared for attack. They gave him a brisk nod, then went back to their guard positions.

There was one option - he could go straight to Fury's office; it was likely that anyone invading would try to kill Fury. But they would also slaughter their way through everyone else in between them and their target, especially if it was the Toclafane. (It was too quiet for Toclafane, he noted in the back of his mind. Their childish giggles would have filled the air.)

Into the mess hall, and there still wasn't any sign of their adversary. Fury only had a handful of SHIELD agents down here with him - twenty, perhaps - not nearly enough to mount a decent defence. Enemies could slip through somewhere, but Steve didn't know where that would be, didn't know the layout of this place well enough. He _did_ know that they must have got the drop on the surface guards, because the bunker would have been sealed off at the first sign of trouble. Which meant-

He glanced up as the vent cover clattered to the floor, and a black-clad man dropped through it. It was, without a doubt, the same man he'd fought with in Colorado - the Winter Soldier. 

"We gonna do this again?" he asked, cracking his knuckles, then repeated it in Russian, just in case he didn't understand English.

No response. The other man just waited, balancing on the balls of his feet, his gaze flat. He wore a mask of some sort over the lower half of his face; Steve couldn't guess why. To hide his identity, maybe? That wasn't important anymore.

Steve shifted to hold the shield in front of him, hiding the muscles of his chest. It meant he could only punch with one hand, but it also kept him from telegraphing his moves as much, and the Winter Soldier barely had time to block the punch he threw to his stomach. Steve brought the rim of his shield up against his arm a split second later, jarring the limb enough to make his opponent drop his gun. That had been his real goal; the punch to the stomach had been to distract him. He kicked the gun away, the metal skittering against the concrete of the floor as it spun off into a corner.

A normal opponent might have spat a curse then, but the Winter Soldier was completely silent. He waited and watched, and threw a kick out to try and sweep Steve's legs out from under him. They were both feinting, judging the other's skill with small things. Or, Steve thought bitterly, the Soldier was just toying with him again.

They exchanged a flurry of blows, none of which scored a significant hit. This was the waiting phase of the game, the part where they tested their stamina. Steve knew that they were evenly matched this time, and that the one who lasted the longest would be the one walking away from this fight. Usually, that was him, but if this guy had enhanced strength to match him - maybe HYDRA had succeeded with their version of the serum, and Russia had got their hands on it after they'd defeated Germany. It wasn't a comforting thought. Where there was one super soldier, there would probably be more.

The Soldier backed up, picking up one of the tables and throwing it at Steve, who barely managed to duck and dodge it, rolling on the floor and under another table, which took the brunt of the blow and was carried over onto its side from the momentum. He kicked the next one along in the other man's direction, into a couple more tables; the chairs scattered everywhere. 

Steve grabbed the legs of one chair, throwing it at him, then another, and another, not giving him any time to rest. Anything and everything around him had to be used as a weapon, and he knew that if he threw his shield, he wouldn't be getting it back unless he went and got it. There was no chance he could hit the guy and make it ricochet back to him; he was good, but not that good.

In the hail of chairs, the Winter Soldier began to advance on Steve, batting them aside with his metal arm. Steve picked another chair up and feinted with the legs, trying to tangle his arms in it - but that would've been too easy. Instead, the other man grabbed a leg and twisted it, bending the metal back until it formed a U shape.

"All right," Steve grunted, "point taken. No more chairs." He'd pretty much thrown everything in the immediate vicinity, anyway, creating an open space for their fight. He dropped the chair, and the two of them circled each other warily. 

" _Where is the girl?_ " the Winter Soldier growled in Russian, his voice muffled by the mask.

Hopefully exactly where he'd told her to stay, Steve thought. He lashed out with the shield, trying to get the Soldier in the midriff and wind him, but he caught the rim of his shield in his metal hand.

" _Not the right colour._ " The voice sounded confused, and for the first time, he showed a flicker of emotion in his eyes. "It's not-" He blinked, shook his head and swore in Russian. He lashed out again, a kick combined with an armhold that Steve _knew_ \- not because he'd learnt it in the Army, but because Bucky had shown it to him when he'd been teaching him how to fight. 

And he'd shown him how to counter it, too. Steve broke the hold, twisted the Soldier's arm back until the metal groaned in protest. His other hand scrabbled at the Soldier's face, finding the edges of the mask - pulled it away -

They were Bucky's eyes, ringed in eyeblack, Bucky's face, forever frozen in his mind as he fell away from him, and suddenly Steve's fingers were numb as the mask clattered to the floor.

"Bucky?"

Bucky just stared at him like a frightened rabbit, all traces of the deadly Russian assassin gone. He didn't see any recognition in his eyes, just confusion and fear. 

"Bucky, c'mon, it's me." Steve lowered his shield for a moment. "You know me."

His eyes darted from side to side. "I don't-"

"It's Steve." He reached out like he was trying to coax a feral cat to him. "Remember me? Christ, Buck, we grew up together. You gotta remember something." His tone was pleading, desperate. Whatever they'd done to him, HYDRA, the Soviets, he had to be able to reverse it. Had to be able to make his best friend remember him.

"Need to- to catch the girl," he stammered. "Catch the girl and bring her back. Stop her, but no killing. So much killing."

"I know, Bucky." Steve tried to keep his voice low and soothing. "Just stay with me, and I'll take care of you. You won't have to kill anyone else."

Bucky glanced around nervously, then made a break and ran for the hall leading to the surface.

"Shit!" Steve swore, chasing after him. He vaulted over a table and up the first few stairs, and-

"Stop it, Rogers." Fury was standing at the other end of the mess. "We're going to relocate once everything is clear, and we'll need your help."

"But that was-" Steve gestured. "Sir-"

"I know who it was." His expression softened for a moment before slipping back into its usual scowl. "I know what he means to you. But taking down the Master is our top priority. We cannot let anything get in the way of that, Rogers. Once he's dead, then you can look for Barnes. You have my word."

"I'm taking Martha to Rio with me," he blurted out as Fury turned to leave. "She's hiding something, and I think it's important."

"Uh-huh. You gonna find it with your tongue?" His tone was bland as he arched the eyebrow over his good eye. Of course he had cameras everywhere; Steve didn't even know where he got the goddamn electricity to run them. Nobody else had lights, but Nick Fury could spy on every corner of his little domain. It didn't surprise Steve at all.

"Just as soon as you find who double-crossed you and sold you out to the Master." It wasn't a great comeback, but it was all Steve had.

"He followed you here, same as he's followed you all across America. Doesn't take a genius to work that out, not when he's looking for the girl. Take her with you; at least it means he won't try to kill my people again. In the meantime, we gotta get out of here before he leaks our location to the Toclafane."

"I got it," Steve said to Fury's back.

"Good. Then use it. Do what I dug you out of the goddamn ice for, Rogers."


	6. six

_On a cargo tanker, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, March 2009_

"You did this for weeks?" Steve sounded dubious as he cracked open one of their carefully hoarded bottles of water, taking a sip.

"Twelve days to Honolulu, ten from there to California. Do you know, I've heard rumours that I sailed the Atlantic all by myself?" Martha laughed, shaking her head. "God, I don't even know where I would've got a boat from, let alone figured out how to sail it." And navigation? That was wholly beyond her. She would have capsized in a storm, or ended up floating in the middle of the ocean, dying from starvation and thirst, or made land somewhere entirely other than where she'd meant to go.

"Maybe they thought you paddled across on a palm tree." He offered her an amused grin.

"Or a raft made out of them, like something out of a movie." She rolled her eyes. "Just call me Robinson Crusoe." The cargo ships, she'd found out (to her detriment) rocked with the waves more than a cruise ship might have, and they were slower, but it was the only way to cross oceans. There were no transcontinental cargo flights anymore; airplanes rarely flew at all. "I don't think the Martha Jones in the stories is anything like the real one."

She didn't want them telling stories about her, truth be told; they were meant to be telling stories about the Doctor. But she knew they got passed on as well, so she had to just be satisfied with that, and pretend that she was capable of living up to her legend.

"Now you know how I feel. Just wait till they start making comic books about you."

"They'll never make anything about me." She shook her head. She didn't _want_ anything in her honour; if things went right, she didn't want anyone to remember what she'd done for them at all. She just wanted her life to be normal again. "And, honestly, a comic book? It'd be way too dull."

"Nobody tells the truth in those things. You know how many times Captain America punched Hitler in the comics? A hell of a lot more than I did in real life, unless you count the shows I did." There was a soft, self-deprecating laugh from Steve. "You could punch the Master. I'd read that."

"No, they'd probably have _you_ punch the Master and then save me from him. I know how comics work." Or how she thought comics worked, anyway; she'd never actually read any, but suspected she would be cast as the damsel in distress. Martha leaned back against the side of their cargo container. Talking about comics was all well and good, but it meant they were avoiding the real elephant in the room. Or possibly a herd of elephants.

"The attack back in Washington," she began. "Was it-"

"The Winter Soldier." Steve's tone was brusque, like she'd never heard it before. "He's been following us the whole time."

For once, Martha had actually stayed put when Steve had told her to; she hadn't witnessed their fight, but she was glad she hadn't had to patch him up again. They couldn't afford to lose any more time. "I don't understand why he keeps waiting so long in between attacks. It doesn't make any sense. If he's so skilled, he could catch us at any time, but he's only tried to do it twice, and he failed both times." She didn't think the first attack had been an attempt to catch them - more to get them going in the direction he wanted.

"Martha..." Steve sighed, then fell silent. He closed his eyes, reaching up to rub his face with a hand; with the other, he blindly reached for one of hers. "During the fight, I pulled the mask he was wearing off. The Winter Soldier...it's Bucky."

"Bucky? Bucky Barnes? That Bucky?" Over the course of their journey together, she'd pried the story from him little by little, piecing it together. Nearly every time they'd been caught out in the snow together, he'd had flashbacks to the day he'd lost Bucky in that pass in the Alps; the only thing Martha could do was wait it out with him, hope he'd come back to himself. She knew how much Bucky meant to him, and to find him-

"But why is he a Russian assassin?" And why did he appear to be the same age as Steve?

"I don't know. I just- I _know_ it's him, Martha. Even if I hadn't seen his face - he used moves when we were fighting that Bucky taught me, moves he picked up on the street in Brooklyn. No Russian could know that."

She wondered if the Master had known that Steve would be protecting her, and if he'd sent his childhood best friend to catch her because of that - to add that extra personal touch to the torment he inflicted. It seemed exactly like the sort of thing he would do; he'd probably laugh if Bucky killed Steve.

"But he didn't recognise me," Steve continued. "The shield, yeah, but he didn't know _me_. I don't know how that's possible. I'm way outta my depth here." He squeezed her hand. "I came with you because I think they injected him with the serum - HYDRA, maybe, when they took him prisoner, or if the Soviets somehow got the formula from Germany. If you've got a super-soldier after you, then you need me to keep you safe. Nobody else can do it."

"And because you know he'll come for me again." Martha wasn't stupid; Steve was using her as bait. He'd agreed to come with her before he'd known about Bucky, but this was the icing on the cake.

"Well..." Steve looked a little guilty. "It's not like that. I mean, I'm not going to put you in danger to try and get to him. It's danger you would've been in anyway, and I'm trying to protect you. Trying to protect both of you. There's something wrong with him - when we were fighting, he seemed...confused. Like he didn't know what was going on, or who he was. He kept switching languages. He needs help."

"Yeah, okay." Steve was right, and he was playing on her sympathy, damn him - whether he knew it or not. "But what are you going to do with him once you've got him? We can't _stay_ anywhere long enough for you to figure it out."

"I guess I'll have to leave you. Hole up somewhere here and just...try and do what I can for him. You won't have to worry about him catching you anymore."

"No, just the usual humans I've been running from all along." Her voice held a hint of sarcasm. It wasn't as if avoiding capture this whole time had been _easy_ , after all, and maybe she'd come to rely on having Steve by her side a little too much. Maybe she just didn't want to admit that she was going to miss him, that she would be lonely without him.

But it was only two more months. She could handle that.

She wondered if she ought to tell him about the plan - but she didn't want him to realise what would happen when all this was done. Didn't want to crush the sudden hope he'd been given by telling him that when the Master was defeated, everything would revert to the way it had been before. He would be back in the ice, anything he'd done to help Bucky would be undone, and-

Wait.

"Where were you in the ice?" she blurted suddenly.

"What?" Steve looked confused at the sudden change of topic. "I- I don't know. You'd have to ask Fury, I think he got someone to look-"

"You don't have any idea?" God, she couldn't bear to think of him frozen again, and for how many years? If she didn't know where to look, then she couldn't get Fury to rescue him, and-

Why had she kissed him? Had it just been in the heat of the moment, all the tension they'd been feeling for months coming to a head right before a battle? Because she'd been afraid she would never see him again, like Peggy before her? She liked Steve - really liked him - but she knew he was ultimately destined to forget her entirely. He would never remember any of this, even the kiss, whenever they dug him out of the ice. And she'd bloody well gone and fell for him anyway.

She really needed to reconsider her taste in men when all of this was over.

"Canada, somewhere?" He shrugged helplessly. "Maybe Greenland? I don't know where I was when the plane went down, and Stark said his dad looked for it over the years, but he could never find it. I don't- why does it matter?" His brow furrowed in confusion.

"It doesn't," she lied, turning her head away from him slightly so he couldn't see the look on her face. "I was just wondering." Martha was a terrible liar; always had been, always would be.

"You can trust me, Martha." He leaned forward a little, looking at her with those big blue eyes, and, _oh_ , it made her stomach flip. 

"I really can't." She laughed bitterly, the sound strangled in her throat. "I can't trust anyone at all." If he knew what her mission really was- 

Well. At this point, it probably couldn't be stopped. She had to hope that the word of mouth kept spreading around the world, to the places she hadn't been able to go. It could carry on without her, even if she died. That was a reassuring thought, at least; her family could still survive. Maybe she could, too. She didn't quite know how that worked, but if time reverted, wouldn't she be brought back to life, just like everyone else?

The Doctor would probably know. She didn't have any bloody idea.

"I guess none of us can in this world." 

_That_ was more cryptic than she was used to hearing from Steve. He was one of the most straightforward people she'd ever met, and she didn't understand why he'd said that, or why he sounded a little sad. Did it have something to do with her? Or was it because he'd found out that his best friend was a Soviet assassin? She didn't know, and she didn't want to ask.

 

_Rio de Janeiro, April 2008_

Fury had given them the name of a single contact in Rio - a codename, really, nothing more to go by. _Verde_. An unassuming, rumpled-looking American in glasses, as it turned out, who-

" _Who_ sent you here?" He frowned as he gestured for them to enter his flat. It was dark and shabby - well, shabby was putting it politely. He lived in the same squalor as everyone else in the neighbourhood. Rio de Janeiro was one of the places that had welcomed the Master's occupation; it meant they would get regular meals and potable water. Most of them still lived in their old homes; moving them out of the honeycomb of slums would have been too much work, taken too much time, when they didn't even resist what happened.

"Nick Fury." Steve looked for a place to sit, eyed the single chair in the place dubiously, and opted to stand.

"I'm sorry, I've never heard of the name. I haven't been in the States in years." He sounded apologetic. "I don't have anything to do with the resistance - I just keep my head down, like everyone else. I really think you're in the wrong place." There was an edge of _something_ to his movements, Martha noticed. Like nervousness, but not quite.

"Please, we need someone to help. I don't know if you've heard of me; I'm Martha. Martha Jones." She had already spent a few days going through the factories, lurking in the shadows and whispering stories to people during their breaks. Even if they accepted the Master's rule, she still had to try.

"You?" He leaned closer, peered over his glasses at her. "You aren't a killer."

"Did I say I was?" 

"The stories say you're putting together a weapon to kill the Master. Whether or not that's true...I don't think you could do it. I've known killers, Martha Jones, and you aren't one of them." He turned and eyed Steve, more than six feet of extremely obvious muscle. "Him, on the other hand..."

"I don't think we've been introduced. Steve Rogers." Steve smiled politely - that classic all-American look - and offered a hand for him to shake.

"No." He looked dazed, felt for the chair and collapsed back into it. "God, I thought you were dead. Everyone thought you were dead, that the most valuable scientific secret in America's history went down with you."

"Not dead, just frozen." Steve looked down at his hand, decided Bruce probably wasn't going to shake it, and let it fall back to his side. "Although I'm not sure I'm the most valuable scientific secret in American history."

"You would be if you knew how much money's been spent trying to recreate the formula Erskine used on you. Decades of study, and nobody's come close." He shook his head, gaze dropping to his hands, folded in his lap. "Though I'm not sure that's a bad thing."

"Sorry, but you're- besides Verde, I mean?"

"Verde?" He looked up and raised an eyebrow. "Is that the name they're using for me? Figures. I'm Dr. Bruce Banner. But, like I said, I can't help you with anything. Whatever you want, you've already got with him." Bruce gestured to Steve.

"We need to get to the UNIT headquarters-"

"No, we don't." Steve interrupted Martha, and she frowned at him. He drew a small black case from his pocket - one she instantly recognised as the weapon that should have been in her pack. "You've been lying to me all along, Martha. Whatever this is, you already have all the parts you need."

Oh, hell. Martha leaned back against the table, which wobbled precariously under her weight, and rubbed her face. "You took it from me." She didn't know how to feel. Yes, he'd betrayed her trust, but not because he was a double agent. He'd done it because he wanted to kill the Master - undoubtedly because Fury had told him to. She should have been angry, but in the end, she just felt _tired_. She should have figured it out sooner, should have been checking on it regularly, but she'd made the stupid assumption that it was safe. And now they were having an argument in front of a man they'd just met, who, for all they knew, could be a double agent.

"I wanted to keep you safe, Martha," Steve pleaded with her. "Like he said, you aren't a killer. No matter what you think you can do, you wouldn't be able to live with yourself afterwards. I've done it before, and I can do it again. I'm probably the only guy who can get close enough to the Master to kill him."

"The Toclafane will still chop you into mince," she retorted sharply. "You'll have the hero's death you want, and what will it accomplish? Absolutely nothing. Even if you get close enough-"

"-it's not a weapon," Bruce finished. "It's a cover story." He blinked at both of them when they fell silent in surprise. "What?" He leaned forward and took the case from Steve's hand, flipping it open. "You've got vials of coloured water here. If this were a real weapon, you couldn't just carry it around in your backpack. The chemicals would require special storage, and they'd have to be kept in the same place so you could put it together when you need it. Good story, though."

"You made me cross America in the middle of winter to get a little bottle of coloured water that you _already had_." Steve's tone was flat, but she could hear the anger in his voice.

"No." Martha tipped her chin up, meeting his eyes. "I made you cross America in the middle of winter so I could tell my story to everyone we met. That's the real mission. That's why I've been going around the world, to spread the word of the Doctor."

"You're completely insane!" He threw his hands in the air. "I thought you were going to kill a maniac, but, no, you're just- just telling stories about some man who might not even be real! And for what? Bringing hope to people is all well and good, but it won't _do_ anything, Martha. You've seen the people. Captain America can't help them, the Doctor can't help them, because they won't rise up and help themselves. They're too damn scared to do anything, so they just let themselves be slaughtered like cattle - because that's exactly what'll happen if they _do_ try to take their planet back."

"There's another part to it." Martha kept her voice calm and even. "The paradox machine. That's the secret to the Toclafane."

"Paradox machine?" Bruce and Steve echoed the phrase at the same time.

"Something involving a temporal paradox to be held in place, right?" Bruce frowned. "I mean, it's all highly theoretical physics, totally outside my wheelhouse, but-"

"No, you're right. The rift in the sky is held open by a paradox machine. That's the only reason why the Toclafane can be here; because they aren't aliens, they aren't robots. They're us." She'd worked it out in the last few months; the Doctor had locked the TARDIS so it could only go between their present and the distant future, which meant that the only things the Toclafane could be were the people she'd helped find Utopia. More blood on her hands, and oh, it made her heart ache to think about it. "The paradox is that they're killing their ancestors; they shouldn't be able to exist if they do that. But the paradox machine keeps them here. So that has to be destroyed, too." And she wasn't sure yet how that would happen; what she knew was that she had to make it back to the Valiant in time.

"Great. So what you have is a bunch of stories and an impossible machine. Exactly how is that a concrete plan to destroy the Master?"

"I don't know." She shrugged helplessly. "The Doctor knows." She knew, of course, that the stories were to key him into the Master's psychic network - but if anyone betrayed them, then _that_ secret, at least, would be safe. "I just did what he told me. I told you at the very beginning of all this, Steve - I'm not a soldier, I'm a doctor. I heal, I don't kill. Every other conclusion, you drew for yourself. All I can tell you is this: I have a month to get back to England, because it all ends then, a year from when the Master came to power."

"So you need a ship." Bruce spoke up again. "And a distraction."

 

"I can't believe you lied to me for months!" Steve hissed as they pressed close to the poured concrete wall that separated the harbour from the rest of the city.

"As if you have any room to talk! You stole from me the moment I had my back turned!" Bruce had promised them a signal, but hadn't told them what it was - just that they would know. A few enquiries with the local resistance - even here, it existed, it was just harder to find - had given them the information they needed. 

"I was keeping you safe!" he retorted, peering around the corner. The guards were still in place. "Fury said you could stay there-"

"Did it ever occur to you that I didn't need you to keep me safe? That I knew perfectly well what I was doing?" God, they were going to bring the Toclafane down on them if they kept this up. "Would you have done the same thing to Peggy?"

Steve looked like he'd been punched in the gut. As he opened his mouth to reply, a roar loud enough to startle the birds from the trees rang out.

"Do you think that's the signal?"

"What else could it be? Count of thirty, then go." Steve was all business again, his expression inscrutable.

Martha waited thirty seconds, her heartbeat pounding in her ears, then followed Steve through the gate. They kept close to the walls, sneaking through the paths created by the containers, and then-

In the open area used for loading, there was some sort of monster: a giant green man with bulging muscles. He slapped at the swarm of Toclafane hovering around him, smashing them against the pavement. They both stopped and stared at the spectacle.

"What the hell do you think that is?" Steve asked.

" _Verde_." Martha blinked as the wheels in her head turned. "I- I think that's Bruce." The blades didn't seem to be capable of piercing his skin, no matter how hard they tried. There were enough Toclafane surrounding him to cut even a creature that large down to size, clustering until the green skin couldn't be seen anymore. There was another roar, and then he rolled against the pavement, flattening spheres under his body.

"We've got to keep going." Steve broke out of the trance first, tugging on Martha's arm. Even the human guards were busy with the spectacle, but their bullets didn't seem to be any more effective than the Toclafanes' blades. "Whatever happens, he knew what he was doing to buy time for us."

Another name on her list, Martha thought, turning her gaze away from what Bruce had become. Sometimes, it seemed as if people would never stop dying for her.

 

Chapter THE END  
 _England, May 2008_

Waves broke on the shore, fracturing the moon's reflection into splinters. Martha and Steve climbed out of the small boat, standing together in silence for a long moment.

"So," Steve said finally. "This is where it all ends."

"It all ends up there." Martha glanced up to the sky, where the moon peeked through a break in the clouds. "On the Valiant, wherever it is."

"You got a plan to get up there?"

Martha shrugged. "We wait." It was the easiest plan possible: the Winter Soldier had been ordered to capture her, so she would let him do it. "But not till tomorrow."

"I sure hope you know what you're doin'."

"Right now?" She grinned at him, her teeth flashing white in the dark. "Same thing we always do: walk."

Together they clambered up the beach and onto a road; the gravel road led to a paved road, and the paved road led to the motorway, and the motorway promised to lead them west to London. Martha thought of the city, her city, the one she hadn't seen in a year. She remembered the gutters running red with blood, the screams of the populace as they were slaughtered. She remembered running with no real direction, no real purpose, too frightened to know what to do - she just knew that she had to get away.

And now she was returning.

"I'm going to need the gun back," she said finally. "He'll want to destroy it, I'm sure." And if Steve had it - well, the Master wouldn't think twice about killing him. But Martha, he wanted to keep alive for some reason. To torture her, or her family, or the Doctor. If she had the weapon, he would just take it from her and destroy it.

"All right." Steve shrugged and handed her the case. "Not like I can do anything with it anyway."

Without stopping, she unshouldered her pack, depleted of its supplies, and placed the gun inside. It didn't matter what she did with it now; there was no point in trying to hide it. She wanted it found.

"There's one other thing I've got to tell you." Martha took a deep breath. "When the paradox machine is broken-" She halted, her words catching in her throat. "When it's broken, time will be rewritten. This entire year will be reversed. That's how the world will be saved, by undoing everything the Master's wrought. Everyone will be brought back to life; none of this will have ever happened."

It took her words a moment to sink in, but when they did, Steve closed his eyes slowly, stopping in the middle of the road. The sun, just beginning to crest the horizon, lit him from behind, like some sort of a statue. His shoulders slumped in dejection. "I'll be back in the ice." The words were barely audible.

Martha nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

"Martha, I don't know if I can." For the first time, she heard fear in Steve's voice. The man had been willing to die to end the Master's reign, had already sacrificed himself to defeat HYDRA, but being frozen again was what truly terrified him. Suspended in time, unconscious, the decades passing as everything he'd known withered and died. If he woke up at all, it would be to a world he no longer recognised, with no one who knew him still alive.

She took both his hands in hers. "You won't realise it. Won't remember any of this. It'll happen in a flash." Which was cold comfort, she knew; she would have felt the same way, would have gone back kicking and screaming. In that, at least, Steve had more self-restraint than she did.

"What about you? Will you remember?" He looked down into her eyes.

"I don't know." Martha shrugged, wishing she had a better answer to offer him. She knew what would happen, but not how. In truth, she hoped she would forget the horrors she had seen, but she didn't think it would be that easy. Life never was. The only bright spot was that she would remember Steve, and that was bittersweet at best, remembering someone who you knew would forget you.

"Here." Steve patted his pockets down before he came up with a notebook and pen. He scrawled something down on one of the pages, then ripped it out, folded it in half, and gave it to her. "Take this to Fury. Make sure- make sure I'm not stuck there."

"I promise." She took the paper from him, tucked it into an inner pocket of her coat, and kissed his hands. "I'll come back for you." Even if she had to drag the Doctor all over the Arctic to make him do one last favour for her.

Another half-hour's walk brought them to a town, one of the ones that had been deserted, the population moved to a labour camp. It was a perfectly ordinary town, with a high street indistinguishable from a thousand others. Somehow, Martha had imagined this being more dramatic, like a showdown on the cliffs of Dover or in front of the Houses of Parliament. But the location didn't matter, only the time. 

Martha eyed their surroundings, then pulled off the TARDIS key, tucking it into a pocket. She stood in the middle of the street; Steve took up a position around the corner of a building, just in case. He was just out of her range of vision, but she knew he was there, knew he wouldn't let anything happen to her. 

"Hello?" she called out. "Winter Soldier, are you out there?" She paused for a moment, then added, "Bucky?"

It seemed utterly daft, calling for someone who had chased you halfway round the world. She didn't even know if he was still here - but she guessed that he hadn't given up the chase yet. He seemed to know where they would be even before they did.

"Don't call me that." The voice, low and raspy, came from an alley; Martha spun on a heel, holding up her hands to show she was unarmed.

"Winter Soldier?"

"Bucky." He advanced on her from the shadows. "That's not my name anymore." He looked haggard and worn, his eyes bloodshot. "The man that name belonged to is dead."

Martha took a step forward. "Steve doesn't think so," she said quietly. She didn't look back over her shoulder at him, couldn't take her eyes off of the man in front of her.

"I can't be-" His hands flexed, flesh and metal. "He said not to harm you. He said to leave you for him."

"Are you going to call him?" Martha licked suddenly dry lips. She tried to tell herself that she was in control of the situation, that she would be fine. She just had to get to the Valiant. Just had to hope everyone was still alive. Just had to let things happen. She'd triggered an avalanche, and all she could do was let it come down on her head.

"There's no need." A Toclafane swooped down on the pair of them, hovering at eye height, then another, then another, till they were dancing around them in a circle. "He's watching us. Always watching us."

"Indeed I am." A flash of light, and the Master stepped forward. His suit was crisp and clean, and he beamed beatifically at the pair of them. "Oh, Martha Jones. You tried so hard, didn't you? Came so close, and in the end?" He spread his hands wide. "In the end, it all meant _nothing_."

There was a swishing sound in the air, and the Winter Soldier darted to the side, reaching out and catching the shield with his metal hand a moment before it connected with the Master's neck.

"Did you think I had forgotten about your friend, Miss Jones?" He arched an eyebrow. "You should have told him what bad luck you are. What fate you bring to everyone around you. You should have warned him before you ever let him set foot on English soil. But, then again, you seem to enjoy it when others are punished for your transgressions."

"It takes more than a super-soldier to kill me," the Master continued. "Even your little friend in Brazil couldn't - although, I must say, he's provided me with a fascinating diversion lately. And now you think _you_ can." He grinned. "Give me your pack, Martha Jones."

Slowly, Martha lowered her hands, sliding the straps of her pack from her shoulders and passing the burden to the Master. He opened the pack and seemed satisfied when he found the case. "Ah, and I suppose this is it?" He plucked each vial from the gun one by one, dropping them to the ground and crushing them under his heel. The glass shattered easily, the water spilling to the pavement amongst the twinkling shards. "Nice try."

Martha said nothing; couldn't allow herself to say anything. Instead, she simply stared at the Master.

"We have an appointment to keep, Martha. As for the good Captain - my, you _do_ like captains, don't you? - _kill him_." The last was uttered in Russian as the Master made eye contact with the Winter Soldier. The Soldier stared down at the shield in his hands, back up at the Master-

-and then Martha and the Master were back aboard the Valiant in the blink of an eye.

"I could let you watch," he continued. "But I'm afraid we've got better things to do. _Bigger_ things. Today, your blood will baptise the beginning of a new Time Lord empire." The Master caressed Martha's cheek, just the barest brush of fingertips, and it was all she could do to keep from shuddering.

"Don't worry! Your family's still here to watch. And Jack, and the Doctor. It'll be a nice little reunion, won't it?" He kept talking as two of his soldiers took her arms, leading them to the bridge in a twisted parody of a parade, displaying his prisoner for all to see. If televisions had still worked, Martha had no doubt he would have broadcast it as propaganda. His final triumph.

As they entered the bridge, Martha saw them all - her parents, Tish, Jack, the wizened Doctor - and she wanted desperately to pull away from her captors, to run to them and embrace them again. Tears pricked at her eyes, but she couldn't cry, not yet. She wouldn't give the Master the satisfaction of crying in front of him, whatever the reason. Instead, she stood before him, listening to him go on about his victory, and then-

"A gun?" Martha laughed, shaking her head in disbelief. So close. The countdown was almost done. God, she was terrified, but she wouldn't let it show. Couldn't. She thought about Steve down below, fighting his best friend, knowing that any minute, time would rewrite itself and put him back in the ice.

"Yes, a gun, what about it?" He sounded impatient. Martha wondered if he'd written his speech out beforehand.

"A gun in four parts, scattered around the world? You actually believed that?" She shook her head.

"As if I would ask her to kill," the Doctor whispered. Martha thought back to her conversation with Steve, huddled together in their tent. She might have done it - even now, standing in front of the Master, she could imagine herself doing it - but it was something the Doctor would never ask of her, never ask of anyone. And she wouldn't have asked it of anyone else, either; if it had come down to that, she would have taken the burden upon her own shoulders.

"Well, it doesn't matter," he huffed. "You're still going to die."

"You didn't ask what I was doing, travelling around the world all that time." She allowed herself to smile finally. The countdown ticked down behind him; just a matter of seconds. "I told a story, that's all. No weapons, just words. I told them about the Doctor, everything he's done for them, all the times he's saved everyone without them even knowing it. And I told them to pass it on."

"Oh, good, a _story_." Sarcasm dripped from the Master's words. "How terribly useful. If there's one thing that'll save you from death, it's telling the world about your poor sanctimonious Doctor."

"But that's not all I did. I gave them a set of instructions, too, just what the Doctor told me: _use the countdown_."

"What?" The Master tensed, showing fear for the first time. _Ten, nine, eight-_

"If everyone thinks of one word at the same time," she continued, "and if that word is _Doctor_ -" _Seven, six, five-_

"Nothing will happen." He was blustering now, trying to show bravado. "Is that your weapon, _prayer_?" _Four, three, two-_

"One word, but with the power of fifteen satellites binding everyone together. A telepathic   
network connecting the whole of the human race, with all of them thinking the same thought at the same time." Her smile grew. _One._ " _Doctor_."

Martha heard everyone else whisper the word with her; she fancied she could _feel_ it, the entire world linked together. The power of the human race behind her and her faith in the Doctor, everything she had travelled and done, everyone she had spoken to, all condensed down to this single moment. One single word.

 _Doctor_.


	7. epilogue

_Washington, D.C., August 2011_

"So, Doctor Jones."

Martha found herself standing in front of Nick Fury once more - a Nick Fury who, thankfully, didn't remember her or the argument they'd had, or the fact that he'd ordered Steve Rogers to betray her and assassinate the Master. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to make him any friendlier.

"Even before you earned your degree, you had a job offer from UNIT. You accepted it, worked for them for a couple years before being seconded to their New York office, mysteriously ended up back in London, and _then_ you sent us a resume for a job position we don't even _have_ , citing expertise in xenobiology, a field we have no interest in-"

"-although you probably ought," she interrupted, because it really was a grave oversight. And she _was_ something of an expert on xenobiology, or at least as much of one as you'd find on Earth; she'd certainly dissected enough alien specimens in her time at UNIT. 

"You'll forgive me if I'm more concerned with pre-existing threats on this planet." He snorted derisively.

"I'll forgive you, but do remember that I warned you." She smiled brightly at him. Let him believe aliens didn't exist; she had the feeling he would be proven wrong sooner or later. It was a common delusion in a world that still insisted on blaming everything peculiar that happened on terrorists or gas leaks or any other explanation they could possibly grasp at.

"And in your cover letter, you specifically requested to interview with _me_. Do you think I've personally interviewed everyone who works here?"

"Probably not," she admitted with a shrug. He seemed like the sort of person who let his underlings handle administrative duties like that. Nick Fury was a more hands-on kind of guy.

"The only saving grace is that your UNIT file? Has a large section that even _I_ don't have the clearance to read. Do you know what the odds are of that happening?"

"Fairly slim?" And her UNIT file didn't even contain a tenth of what she'd experienced. Not even UNIT would have believed some of it.

"I thought I had the clearance to read pretty much everything everywhere." He folded his arms over his chest and glowered at her with one baleful eye. "So what makes you so special?"

"Me specifically? Not much, other than what you've already seen in my CV." Only the fact that she'd walked across six continents to save the world. Unfortunately, that wasn't the sort of thing you could put on a CV - at least, not when nobody else remembered it. "But I brought you a message." She pulled the paper out of her suit pocket, still in its original crisp fold, and placed it flat on the desk, sliding it across to him.

Fury picked it up and unfolded it, reading the word written on there. "And what, might I ask, does this relate to?"

"Steve Rogers." She tipped her chin up stubbornly. "You need to dig him out of the ice."

"That's not your handwriting." He flipped the paper over, studying the map on the other side. "And _that_ is my handwriting. I'd be really interested to know how you got this."

"I'm afraid you don't have the clearance for that information, Director Fury. But that's what you need to know to find him. He's still alive. _Get him out._ " 

"And then what? Put him on display at the Smithsonian?" Fury looked unimpressed.

Martha took a thumb drive out of her pocket, setting it on the desk - this time keeping it in front of her. "The Torchwood Institute has the only functional cryogenics system on Earth - has had it for more than a century. This contains all the information they have on bringing people out of cryogenic sleep. Obviously not exactly the same procedure, but the principle is similar." She kept her hand on the thumb drive. "I can lead the procedure to revive him. Without me, you don't get the information."

"And without me, you don't get Rogers out of the ice." He studied her for a moment. "I can't decide whether you're completely insane or telling the truth. But I've had enough crazy shit happen to me that I'm willing to take a gamble on the latter. Consider yourself hired."


End file.
